The New York Times published one of its all-time silliest anti-Trump stories yesterday, but it was on a deadly serious subject: the coronavirus.

The headline said it all:

Some Experts Worry as a Germ-Phobic Trump Confronts a Growing Epidemic

I don’t know about you, but I don’t regard hating germs as an impediment to fighting a deadly virus. If anything, it might be an advantage.

The purpose of the story is to undermine the President’s credibility at a time when he takes measures to protect the nation from an epidemic.  

The article begins by recalling that Trump, as a private citizen, made remarks to the effect that people with the Ebola virus should not be allowed back in the United States.

The administration is imposing travel restrictions to fight the coronavirus. 

Instead of debating the ins and outs of Trump’s policy, why not just blame it on a dark psychic twist?

The article goes on to note that the president is making friendly noises about Chinese President Xi Jinping of China, whose dictatorship has made the epidemic worse.

For once, the President’s cajolery of Xi is justified: Trump wants to get international health experts into Xi’s closed society to see what is going on and find information that will prevent the coronavirus from reaching epidemic proportions in the rest of the world. The article is utterly gratuitous.

New York Post columnist Betsy McCaughey takes a different view from the Times:

Chinese government officials and the World Health Organization are bad-mouthing the Trump administration for trying to stop the coronavirus from invading the United States. Team Trump is barring foreigners who have been in China recently from entering the country. Americans returning from China are quarantined for 14 days. China ­accuses Trump of arousing fear. The WHO claims the president’s policies “unnecessarily interfere with travel and trade.”

Don’t fall for this bombast.

You can’t fight an epidemic with political correctness. Trump’s travel restrictions are saving lives here and sparing US hospitals, which are already overwhelmed by flu season, from being thrown into crisis.

IWF’s Rachel DiCarlo Currie has already noted how the secrecy of Chinese authorities have made the epidemic so much worse.