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 U.S.' 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 U.S. 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 U.S.' response to the pandemic jointly published by three Chinese think tanks last week concluded that after the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.. About 30 percent of imported cases in the Republic of Korea are from the U.S., and about 14 percent of the cases in Australia originate from the U.S..
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 U.S.. 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 U.S. and beyond have issued a joint statement criticizing the callousness of the U.S. government in driving away these illegal immigrants, without taking any quarantine measures to protect them.
Moreover, the U.S. 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 U.S. military personnel's defiance of local pandemic prevention and control measures.
The parsimony of the U.S. 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 U.S. government's callous indifference to harm it is doing by not making greater efforts to control the virus.
The more political manipulations U.S. politicians conduct, displaying their shameful disregard for people's lives, the more firmly they will be nailed to history's pole of shame.
