US callously indifferent to being a superspreader of the virus: China Daily editorial

chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-08-15 20:39

Images of New Yorkers lost to the COVID-19 pandemic are projected onto the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, the United States, March 14, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

With the most advanced medical research and healthcare system in the world, the United States should have been the strongest link in the world's defensive line against the novel coronavirus. Nevertheless, it has proved to be the weakest.

Although it has only 4 percent of the world's population, the country accounts for 18 percent of the global COVID-19 infections. It is the US' failure to respond to the pandemic at home and its government's divisive efforts to try and politicize it that has caused more than 620,000 deaths on US soil due to the disease, hindered the progress of efforts to contain the virus and sabotaged the global solidarity required for that.

After systematically combing through the facts, a research report on the US' response to the pandemic jointly published by three Chinese think tanks last week concluded that after the US administration realized it had lost the golden opportunity of getting the virus under control at home, it gave up trying to contain it and started loosening its exit controls, which enabled the virus to spread to other countries.

The US government's selfish and brazen thinking is that if it cannot control the virus at home, just let it go where it wants.

Statistics show that from April 2020 to March this year, people from the US made 23.2 million outbound trips, and between November 2020 and January this year, when the average daily infections in the country hit about 186,000, there were 87,000 outbound trips a day on average.

Reportedly, among the variants of the virus in Israel, 70 percent are from the US. About 30 percent of imported cases in the Republic of Korea are from the US, and about 14 percent of the cases in Australia originate from the US.

What is more shocking is that Washington has repatriated large numbers of illegal immigrants to their home countries in Latin America, while the pandemic is raging in the US. Many of the returnees have been infected with the virus, spreading it to Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Haiti, and elsewhere. No wonder more than 60 agencies from the US and beyond have issued a joint statement criticizing the callousness of the US government in driving away these illegal immigrants, without taking any quarantine measures to protect them.

Moreover, the US has around 200 military bases around the world, and its military personnel have spread the virus to the countries where they are stationed, thanks to the US military personnel's defiance of local pandemic prevention and control measures.

The parsimony of the US in supplying its surplus of vaccines to the world, and the indifference it displays to the fact that it is serving as a main source of imported infections in countries around the world speaks volumes about the US government's callous indifference to harm it is doing by not making greater efforts to control the virus.

The more political manipulations US politicians conduct, displaying their shameful disregard for people's lives, the more firmly they will be nailed to history's pole of shame.