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.
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In Europe, the current epicentre of the
pandemic according to WHO, European
Union leaders condemned a travel ban announced
by Trump on Thursday, which excluded the
United Kingdom despite the country having a
comparable amount of cases to many states in the
bloc.
Trump said that decision was because of
the UK's "very strong borders" and not the two
governments' close ties in the wake of Britain's
departure from the EU.
"It's not a very promising environment
for getting high-level political leadership
organised around how they're going to deal with this
as as a global community," Morrison said. "If we are
fragmenting along strategic rivalries and
nationalist tendencies, and denialism, that's moving
in the opposite direction than what we should be
moving towards - how are we going to figure out a
way forward that bridges these divisions and
emphasises the shared common good?"
Echoing that thought, Leana Wen, a physician
and professor of public health at George Washington
University, told Al Jazeera that leaders must heed
the urging of the WHO to cooperate in overcoming the
pandemic.
"This is a public health emergency that
knows no boundaries," said Wen, who is also the
former health commissioner for the city of
Baltimore. "We all need to see that we're in this
together, and what will benefit one country will
benefit the entire world. And similarly, what will
harm one country will harm everyone else."
Coronavirus, politics and the US
A presidential response to the
coronavirus that initially appeared to focus on
downplaying the threat has also had implications for
the outbreak in the US, according to experts.
In a March 7 op-ed in the New York
Times, Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at
the Center for Global Development,
said that initially, "federal officials responded
in a way that suited the narrative Mr Trump
preferred".
"It’s no coincidence that the coronavirus has broken
out across the country as the president has
continued to brag about keeping the disease outside
America's border," he wrote. "Pretending we could
wall out the virus not only gave the public a false
sense of security, it also left the United States
unready for the threat it now faces."
Will the Coronavirus pandemic cause a global
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Others have criticised what at
times appeared to be a greater focus on the economy
over the global health risk. Trump compared the
coronavirus, which has no vaccine or known treatment
regiment, to the flu as markets tanked on March 9,
appearing to insinuate the current situation was
overblown.
Experts
derided the comparison as misleading and
inappropriate.
Since the first US case was reported in
Washington state on January 21, the number of
infections has ballooned to more than 1,200 in 46
states with at least 36 deaths.
'Most profound crisis that Americans
have faced'
On Friday, Trump also pledged up to
$50bn for state and local governments to respond to
the outbreak, waiving interest on federally held
student loans, and giving Secretary of Health and
Human Services Alex Azar the authority to waive
federal regulations and laws to give doctors and
hospitals "flexibility" in treating patients.
However, the urgent tone was much
delayed and Trump appeared to have missed the
gravity of the moment early on in the outbreak,
according to Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"This is the most profound crisis that Americans
have faced in terms of how it impacts their daily
lives," Miller, author of the End of Greatness: Why
America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great
President, told Al Jazeera. "And as you can see from
the profound changes that have occurred, which, in
my lifetime, I've never experienced - this goes
beyond 9/11, goes beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis in
terms of its longevity, its capacity to endure, and
the threat that it poses every single day to
everybody."
Trump, however, "failed in responsibility number
one" which is "levelling with the American public
about the nature and the severity of this crisis".
US testing has also lagged behind other
countries. Public health officials have attributed
the slow response to a combination of factors,
including the
disbanding of the White House’s National
Security Council Directorate for Global Health
Security and Biodefense in 2018 and the failure to
heed the Director of National Intelligence's January
2019 warning of the country's vulnerability to a
viral outbreak.
"I don't take responsibility at all," Trump said
at a news conference on Friday, when asked about the
slow testing, which he vowed had since been
resolved.
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