Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough said historians will blame the coronavirus pandemic on China and President Trump.
Scarborough interviewed Financial Times editor Ed Luce about a piece on China blaming foreign countries for the spread of the coronavirus. “I’ll just say this: Like China, like Trump,” Scarborough said.
“The Chinese are doing just what Donald Trump is doing. Donald Trump is doing just like the communist Chinese are doing. They both screwed up monumentally. Both of them, in their own ways, are going to be blamed by historians for most of what has happened since December. The Chinese at the beginning, and then Donald Trump with his slow response, especially in January and February,” Scarborough said.
“But here you have Donald Trump blaming the WHO, Donald Trump blaming the governors, Donald Trump blaming China, Donald Trump blaming everybody but himself, of course, and the Chinese are doing the same thing on the global level. I don’t think it’s going to work for either,” he added.
Trump has repeatedly chided the World Health Organization for giving “faulty recommendations” as to how the United States should respond to the coronavirus pandemic, calling them “China-centric” and pledging to slash funding for the group.
“The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look,” Trump tweeted in early April. “Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?”
In January, the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions on China following reports of the coronavirus outbreak, ignoring ardent opposition from the WHO. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the action helped mitigation efforts in the U.S.
Trump has faced criticism for not doing more earlier on to mitigate the spread of the virus and prepare the health industry for the wave of patients. A report recently published by the New York Times described Trump as not responding aggressively to repeated warnings about the virus until mid-March. Trump shot back at his critics on Monday, saying they are “playing a very dangerous political game.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeatedly praised China’s efforts to contain the virus in the past, including after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in late January.
“Stopping the spread of this virus both in China and globally is WHO’s highest priority,” Tedros said. “We appreciate the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership, and the transparency they have demonstrated, including sharing data and genetic sequence of the virus.”
In early 2020, members of the U.S. intelligence community reportedly informed Trump that China was lying about the seriousness of the virus, which has infected more than 2.4 million people worldwide since the outbreak began in Wuhan. Officials informed the president that China “appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak” and was “not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.”
Fox News reported U.S. officials are certain the Chinese government went all-out in an effort to conceal the viral outbreak and cited sources who expressed confidence that the World Health Organization either played a role in a cover-up or looked the other way.
One study indicated that if China hadn’t misled the world about the virus’s severity, the amount of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95%.
