Quote from: mu_enrico on Today at 04:55:09 PM

Quote from: figmentofmyass on April 15, 2020, 07:59:26 PM

trump is desperately trying to deflect blame for american incompetence onto the WHO and china. it's definitely conjuring up belligerent sentiment from westerners, who are eating it up by the spoonful.

Well, I would say all of them (i.e., Trump, WHO, CCP) take part in this madness; however, CCP & WHO should take most of the blame.

why is this even your focus? have you ever stopped for a moment and thought about why the conservative media is so concerned about finding someone else to blame?

the only people who should truly care about that is politicians (like trump) who will lose their political legitimacy and public office if they don't successfully convince the public that it was somebody else's fault.

you know, it's perfectly consistent to believe
-the CCP should have acted sooner
-the WHO acted as a CCP tool
-the trump administration fucked up in any every imaginable way

without transforming that into "it's all china's fault, they must suffer for what they've done!" which serves no purpose other than to distract you from the incredible failings of your own government.

consider what it meant for china to act sooner: they recognized clusters of atypical pneumonia (cases of which normally already number in the millions per year), identified a common source, isolated the genetic structure of the virus, and worked to determine virulence and transmissibility all within a few weeks! it's incredible that they were able to provide the genetic code to the rest of the world so quickly.

consider what it meant for the USA to act sooner: the pentagon was aware of unusual high reporting of atypical pneumonia in wuhan in december. the CDC and NIH were officially informed by january 3. the WHO informed the public on january 5. at the very latest, the trump administration knew of human-to-human transmission on january 20, likely earlier. the trump administration literally did nothing until it shut down travel from china on february 2. then we saw the first stay home order filed in the USA on mach 19. until april 3, the CDC continued telling people not to wear masks in public. the national stockpile of PPE was virtually nonexistent. there is still no hope of widespread testing in the USA, who will undoubtedly be the worst hit country by the pandemic, at least officially.

the contrast is stark. you have to remember---in january, this was a newly discovered virus, about which nothing (include transmissibility) was known. it was a developing situation that was urgently being studied.