The Trump Administration takes China as scapegoat of its slothful response to COVID-19 pandemic, said a CNN commentator in a TV interview on Tuesday.
Fareed Zakaria, an anchor of CNN, said it was clear that President Donald Trump knew the situation, but chose to do nothing and then changed attitude repeatedly and started to make groundless accusations.
At the early stage of pandemic, China had informed the international community that novel coronavirus can be transmitted from human to human and its high risk of spreading. Wuhan City, the central Chinese city once hard-hit by COVID-19, was placed under lockdown to curb COVID-19 spread.
“What has changed is that the Trump Administration and President Trump personally are now being attacked for the fact that they waited essentially six weeks before they did anything. So China has become the scapegoat and the place they attack,” said Zakaria.
The accusation that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab in Wuhan is groundless, he said, questioning “Why would they (the Chinese) deliberately do something that would wreck their economy and kill tens of thousands of their citizens?”It’s because Trump Administration and President Trump are trying to deflect the attention, Zakaria said.
Zakaria said it reminds him of the beginning of Iraq war.
“What you have right now is people in the White House and the State Department forcing the intelligence community, pressuring the intelligence community to come to a conclusion that the intelligence community is clearly not yet ready to come to, may never come to,” he said.
Hua Chunying, spokeswoman of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs retweeted the interview, saying “China will never be Iraq”.
