◆Rick Bright, who was abruptly dismissed as the director of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said he believes his removal is a retaliation for his resistance to expand the scope of drug use in compliance with the demand by the government, and that his professional medical advice has received hostile response from senior officials at the Department of Health.
◆A group of ultra-conservative U.S. congressmen and far-right public officials are launching an organized and well-coordinated attack targeting prominent U.S. biological scientists, said Peter J. Hotez, a medical specialist, in an article published on Scientific American.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-antiscience-movement-is-escalating-going-global-and-killing-thousands/#
◆The U.S. experts working at the Lancet COVID-19 Commission were threatened to give up the widely proven natural origins hypothesis and turn to the lab-leak theory.
8. To serve its own political interests, the U.S. government kept resorting to scapegoating, spreading false information, and smearing other countries.
◆The United States has been sparing no effort to assault China with disinformation for a long time.
According to an article published on U.S. website Politico, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has sent campaigns a detailed, 57-page memo authored by a top Republican strategist advising GOP candidates to address the COVID-19 pandemic by aggressively attacking China.
The memo stressed three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus "by covering it up," that Democrats are "soft on China," and that Republicans will "push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic," said the article. What's more, the memo said that Republicans have indicated they plan to make China a centerpiece of the 2020 campaign. Such cases show that scapegoating and assaulting China has become a whole-of-government approach amid the Republican Party's campaign.
◆According to U.S. media reports, on March 20, 2020, the White House National Security Council asked all federal agencies to ensure continuity of their talking points and disseminate through various channels that China is planning to cover up the epidemic, leading to a global pandemic.
On the same day, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told media that China, Russia and Iran are spreading misinformation to discredit the work done by the United States in epidemic prevention and control.
Such cases have laid bare the one who lies.
◆Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center and Center for East Asia Policy at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview with U.S.-China Perception Monitor that by comparison with China, the United States "has done poorly" in terms of controlling the spread of COVID-19, and former U.S. President Donald Trump "is now blaming China and others for his own mistakes, but the virus is not a member of the Democratic Party or the Chinese government."
◆Since the onset of the pandemic, social media in the United States and Western countries have been flooded with conspiracy theories. Some U.S. officials, congressmen, media, and institutions have concocted and disseminated a large number of fallacies against China, providing no evidence, ignoring basic facts and carrying out presumption-of-guilt kind of smears and attacks on China.
◆The Grayzone, an independent U.S. news website, in April 2020 published an article revealing the process of how conservative journalists in the United States coordinate with the government to spread misinformation: The theory that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan was fabricated by Josh Rogin, a journalist at The Washington Post. Using evasive rhetoric, Rogin based his article published on April 14 on a distorted cable from the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and made up a research scientist who was in fact a U.S.-backed anti-China activist. On April 15, the day after Rogin's op-ed appeared, Republican Senator Tom Cotton sold the conspiracy theory on Fox News, claiming that "the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for every single death, every job lost, every retirement nest egg lost, from this coronavirus." On April 17, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elevated the baseless theory to the global stage when he stated, "We are still asking the Chinese Communist Party to allow experts to get into that virology lab so that we can determine precisely where this virus began."
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/20/trump-media-chinese-lab-coronavirus-conspiracy/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
◆In June 2020, a report by the Australian Institute, a Canberra-based independent think tank, found out that there are many bot-like accounts on social media spreading rumors that the coronavirus is "a bioweapon created by China."
◆By quoting a so-called undisclosed U.S. intelligence, American correspondent Michael Gordon hyped up the fallacy that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which he claimed was based on the information that "three personnel working at the lab were infected."
Nineteen years ago, it was this man who concocted the fake news that Iraq attempted to obtain nuclear weapons, which directly pushed the United States to launch the Iraq War. Nowadays, through similar maneuvers of quoting anonymous sources, he once again hyped up the baseless lab-leak theory of the virus, which is not to be trusted.
9. U.S. failing to control outbound tourists leads to outbreaks in other countries.
◆According to data released by the National Tourism Office of the United States, from April 2020 to March 2021, a total of 23.195 million U.S. citizens traveled abroad via air and land. The country was suffering the peak of the epidemic from Nov. 2020 to Jan. 2021, with its average daily confirmed new cases reaching 186,000. In the same period, the average number of U.S. citizens going abroad was peaked at 87,000.
◆From February 2020 to early January 2021, New Zealand imported 182 cases from the United States, the number of which ranked second in New Zealand.
◆On March 20, 2020, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that about 80 percent of the COVID-19 cases in Australia are imported ones, most of which are from the United States.
◆A study done by Tel Aviv University in Israel in May 2020 showed that about 70 percent of confirmed cases in the country were infected with virus straining from the United States.
◆A research by the National Public Health Institute of Quebec and the McGill Genome Center showed that the source of the epidemic in Quebec mainly strains from Europe and the Americas instead of Asia.
◆In April 2020, an investigation by Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases showed that the second wave of large-scale COVID-19 infections starting from March may have been caused by the imported cases from Europe and the United States.
10. Large-scale repatriation of illegal immigrants by the United States has exported virus to countries in Latin America.
◆Quoting the Customs and Border Protection of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CNN reported that from March to September 2020, the United States had repatriated 160,000 illegal immigrants.
◆More than 60 institutions, including the Washington Office on Latin America in the United States, issued a joint statement condemning the U.S. administration for expelling illegal immigrants during the pandemic, which has put the world at risk. Of the deported Colombian immigrants, one third were infected with the virus.
◆In April 2020, health minister of Guatemala said 50-75 percent of the people repatriated from the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19, accounting for 19 percent of the country's confirmed cases. On April 13, a total of 71 people on a flight carrying 76 repatriated people from the United States tested positive for COVID-19.
◆On June 18, 2020, an op-ed published by The New York Times titled "Why Is the United States Exporting Coronavirus?" pointed out that the United States, with the largest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, is now consciously spreading the pandemic beyond its borders by continuing to deport thousands of immigrants, many infected with the coronavirus, and that in this pandemic, mass deportations are not only cruel but also dangerous to public health abroad and at home. (more)
