A healthcare worker comforts a patient inside a negative pressure room in a COVID-19 unit at Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, Missouri, U.S., August 3, 2021. /Getty
Editor’s note: The following article is taken from the Chinese-language “The Real Point.” The article reflects the author’s opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
“It is now almost impossible to get my husband to a different hospital that has ECMO (artificial lungs),” Susan Walker, an American woman, said anxiously. For days, she has knocked on the door of almost every hospital in Florida, but has been unable to find an ECMO available for her husband who is critically ill with COVID-19.
The U.S. is now facing the fourth wave of spiking pandemic cases. The latest statistics from the New York Times show that in the past week, there were over 118,000 daily confirmed cases and more than 66,000 new hospitalizations on average in the U.S.; and many hospitals across the U.S. were operating at near full capacity. As of the August 11, there were 36 million confirmed cases and 610,000 deaths in the U.S., both of which were the highest in the world.
The harsh reality renders Bloomberg’s recent ranking of the United States as “No. 1 in COVID resilience” ironic, and validates what a joint study by three Chinese think tanks described recently: the U.S. rightly “leads the world in pandemic failure.”
In this study, entitled “America Ranked First?! The Truth about America’s Fight against COVID-19,” the researchers use solid data and an objective standpoint to recount the real situation of the U.S. response to the pandemic, revealing to the world how a superpower with sufficient medical resources and a well-established emergency management system could be overwhelmed by the virus.
Looking back at the timeline of the U.S. fight against the pandemic over the past year or so, it’s easy to see that the U.S. failure was due to the fact that those in power put political interests above people’s lives.
From the very beginning, the pandemic has been a tool of political wrangling and a bargaining chip between Republicans and Democrats. In a bid to win re-election, the then president of the United States repeatedly ignored warnings about the pandemic and deliberately played down its risks; the opposition Democrats at that time also put a lot of effort into “fighting the war of words” rather than actually fighting the pandemic.
Since then, as the pandemic was spreading across the country, almost every initiative related to the pandemic response, from COVID-19 testing, wearing masks and social distancing to vaccination and emergency relief bills, has been hijacked by partisan politics. This has resulted in window after window of opportunity to control the pandemic being missed and Americans who “didn’t have to die” losing their lives one after another.
The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 6, 2021. /Getty
Political interests are paramount while people’s lives are worthless – this cold-blooded American logic of pandemic response led to a series of odd maneuvers.
From the then president becoming the “biggest promoter of disinformation about the pandemic” to silencing scientists and professionals who speak the truth; from spreading conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus and “shifting the blame” to creating a “presumption of guilt” when it comes to the tracing of the virus; and even allowing the virus to be exported to harm the world, the U.S. “pandemic response playbook” is becoming more and more ridiculous.
The failure of the United States, the so-called “world’s leading power,” to control the pandemic at home and its attempt to undermine global cooperation shows that the pandemic is not only a natural disaster but also a man-made catastrophe.
No wonder Dr. William Foege, the American epidemiologist and former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), bluntly denounced it as “a slaughter.” In an article published in June last year, The Atlantic lamented that “we are living in a failed state.”
The virus doesn’t care about politics. This “American tragedy” will not stop if the White House decision-makers don’t change their way and make saving lives the highest priority for the prevention and control of the pandemic.
But unfortunately, even to this day, the political manipulation that ignores the basic human rights of the American people continues, and a huge humanitarian disaster is still spreading across the United States. This is a disgrace for the United States of America and a misfortune for the American people!
