Sen. Chris Murphy said President Trump was to blame for the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, not China or the World Health Organization.
On Tuesday, Trump announced that he would be suspending funding to the WHO until a review on their coronavirus response could be completed. During an interview on CNN hours later, Murphy argued that Trump should be blaming himself for the virus’s spread in the U.S. rather than China or the WHO.
“We knew it was a matter of time before it [coronavirus] arrived here, and it was just shocking how cavalier the administration was. This was at a time when the president really, you know, viewed this as a hoax. He said so on TV,” the Connecticut Democrat said about a closed-door meeting in early February.
He continued, “The 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 that the WHO 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.”
Trump and several public health experts have all noted that China’s refusal to notify the rest of the world about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan attributed the disease becoming a pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, criticized China, saying, “The information wasn’t as forthcoming as I would’ve liked.”
Fauci noted that an early study released by the Chinese Communist Party, which was also touted by the WHO, claimed that the coronavirus could not spread between humans. He said that data delayed the global response.
“This was a virus that was much worse than what I had thought it was going to be based on what we had learned early on, when it was first thought to be something that just jumped from an animal to a human and didn’t really have much capability of going human-to-human,” Fauci explained.
“And then, all of a sudden, you find out that, not only was it not just animal-to-human, that’s probably the way it started, but then, as you go back, you realize there were probably a lot of infection that maybe, if we had delved into that a little bit more, we could’ve learned that, not only is it infecting human-to-human, but it’s transmitting really efficiently,” he explained.
While Trump has used this to justify pulling funding from the WHO, Murphy noted that the president praised China’s transparency on the virus in late January. He claimed that Trump’s withdrawal of funding is an attempt to find “scapegoats.”
“Pulling money out of the WHO has nothing to do with keeping America safe. It’s all about the president’s attempt to try to find scapegoats,” Murphy said. “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,” he added. “So, the president is engaging in, you know, sort of middle-school-grade deflection trying to blame the WHO for something that he was responsible for.”
