On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated that the U.S. is in the crisis it’s in “not because of anything that China did. It’s not because of anything the W.H.O. did. It’s because of what this president did.”
Murphy stated, “[T]he reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did. It’s not because of anything the W.H.O. did. It’s because of what this president did. It’s because he didn’t take this virus seriously. We weren’t going to be able to keep every case out of the United States, but we didn’t have to have tens of thousands of people dying.”
He added that President Trump’s defunding of the W.H.O. is “about the president’s attempt to try to find scapegoats. Let’s be clear, early on, in this crisis, there was no bigger cheerleader for China and their response to coronavirus than President Donald J. Trump. It was President Trump, who on 12 different occasions, praised President Xi’s efforts to control coronavirus, specifically praised China’s transparency, which we now know was a complete joke. And so, the president is engaging in sort of middle school grade deflection, trying to blame the W.H.O. for something that he was responsible for. And the fact of the matter is, while the W.H.O. is imperfect, in the early days of this virus, they invested in testing. They created, by the end of February, 1.4 million tests in collaboration with a German manufacturer. And so, had we been working with the W.H.O. early on, we might be in a very different position here being able to test twice as many, three times as many people as we have. We’ll be weaker as a nation if we pull out of the W.H.O. Because it — there’s no way to stand up an effective, international anti-pandemic program without them. This is just about the president’s attempts to try to blame others for problems that he created.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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