Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy hates President Trump so much, he appears willing to give China a free pass for enabling COVID-19 to become a global pandemic.
“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 the WHO [World Health Organization] did, it’s because of what this president did” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said during a prime-time interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
(Watch the full interview here.)
From the beginning of the outbreak, China made a series of bad-faith decisions that enabled the COVID-19 outbreak to spiral into a pandemic.
The Communist Party of China, or CCP, lied about the disease’s origins, provided misleading reports about its ability to spread human-to-human, understated its numbers, encouraged travel for Lunar New Year, and disappeared doctors and other whistleblowers who tried to sound the alarm.
Public health officials in the U.S. had no choice but to rely on early COVID-19 figures released by the CCP to make life and death decisions.
“The medical community interpreted the Chinese data as this was serious, but smaller than anybody expected because probably, we were missing [a] significant amount of the data,” Dr. Deborah Birx said during a COVID-19 Task Force briefing.
The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) greatly abetted China in spreading its misinformation and lies, including sharing false science on how the virus spreads and applauding China’s totalitarian model of disease control. Sen. Murphy contends they’re not to blame for the crisis, either.
Making matters worse, the CCP continues to act in bad-faith. Its leaders kicked out foreign journalists, including reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
The CCP, according to The Washington Post, also refuses to provide U.S. experts with samples of coronavirus collected from the earliest cases, and placed “severe restrictions requiring approval before any research institution publishes anything on the origin of the novel coronavirus.”
And in case it wasn’t clear that the CCP is responsible for the COVID-19 crisis, a study published in March by the University of Southampton further implicated the communist regime. That study indicated that if Chinese authorities had acted three weeks earlier than they did, the number of coronavirus cases could have been reduced by 95% and its geographic spread limited.
President Trump stressed this point in announcing the U.S. would freeze funding to the WHO until there is full accountability. He said:
Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained as a source with very little death, very little death, and certainly very little death by comparison. This would have saved thousands of lives and avoided worldwide economic damage.
Through its repression, lies, and propaganda, the CCP enabled coronavirus to become a global pandemic, and the WHO abetted those efforts.
As Dan Crenshaw put it, Sen. Murphy’s remarks are what happens “when your hatred for Trump makes you defend a communist government that deliberately hid a virus they knew was spreading around the world.”