Experts warn world leaders will
have to overcome nationalist tendencies to deal with
the rapidly spreading disease.
By Joseph Stepansky
March 14, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The
coronavirus outbreak has swept the globe and
been declared a pandemic, but experts warn the
response of some world leaders, including the
administration of US President
Donald Trump, has been anything but global.
With more than 140,000 people
in some 120 countries infected in the outbreak of
the new coronavirus disease, officially known as
COVID-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) has
stressed that international cooperation is needed to
contain the rapidly spreading virus.
But in recent days, both China, where the virus
was first detected late last year, and the United
States, which on Friday declared a
national emergency, have shown nationalist
tendencies in their political response.
In the US, Trump's approach to the virus has
appeared more concerned with a political narrative
than the public health threat, critics say, with
some calling the president's declaration of a
national emergency too little, too late.
"What we're seeing is kind of fragmentation and politicisation
along nationalist lines as the pandemic spreads and
globalises," Stephen Morrison, senior vice president
of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and director of its Global Health Policy
Center, told Al Jazeera.
In the Trump administration's portrayal of the
outbreak, he said, there has been a "nationalistic,
neo-isolationist perspective of trying to pin the
blame on the Chinese, pin the blame on the Europeans
and trying to minimise or downplay the fact that
wherever the virus originated, it's among all of us,
it's inside of our borders".
On Wednesday, the White House national security
adviser, Robert O’Brien, accused
China of "covering up" the virus when it first
appeared. Meanwhile, Trump administration officials
including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in recent
days have taken to calling the coronavirus the
"Wuhan virus", ignoring WHO's guidelines and
inciting rebuke from Beijing.
At the same time, with the number of
cases falling in China and soaring abroad, Beijing
has started to reject the generally-accepted
assessment that the virus originated in Wuhan, the
capital of the central Hubei province and the
outbreak's hardest-hit city.
On Thursday, foreign ministry spokesman
Zhao Lijian said on Twitter that "it might be US
army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan",
perpetuating a conspiracy theory that has been
circulating online, without providing any evidence.
