Democrats and public-health experts have asked: What should we do? Former President Donald Trump, for his part, minimized the need to act. He instead spoke incessantly about a very different question: Whom should we blame?
…
But now that Biden’s administration is succeeding at bringing the pandemic under control within the United States, Trump’s preferred alternative question… is reclaiming attention.
Trump’s question was of course, from the beginning, politically motivated. He and his supporters hoped that if enough Americans blamed China for creating the problem, that blame would somehow exonerate Trump from so callously mismanaging it.
…
Related on the SLP
Pro-Trumpers want to use Chinese misconduct—real and imagined—as a weapon in a culture war here at home. They are not interested in weighing the evidence. They want payback for the political and cultural injuries inflicted on them by the scientists. They want Fauci to have time in the barrel.
What the rest of us should want is the truth.
Although the Biden administration should defend U.S. scientists against partisan defamation, it has no reason to protect China against the truth, whatever that may be.
