Former Obama foreign affairs official tells Andrea Mitchell Trump is right about WHO and China

Wrong to cut off the funds but right in that WHO delayed declaring emergency and calling a recognized pandemic officially a pandemic owing to Chinese government influence.

Another way to put that: the delay was a price the WHO had to pay for as much belated cooperation and transparency as it was able to get, including this critical piece: China shared the virus, samples and genome, with researchers of the world.

Did that delay cost lives?

Sure it did.

A price China made us all pay, and this is not the only way they made us pay it.

Start, only start, with their wet markets.

PS.

American rightists talking about this stuff, including the conspiracy theorists who say the virus originated in Chinese bioweapons research, delight always in referring to "Communist China" and "the Chinese Communist government" and sometimes, even in civilized society, use the early Cold War expression "Chicom".

But we're a long way from Mao, and these reds are to the real thing what RINOs are to true-blue and ideologically serious Republicans.

CINOs, you might say, though on second thought they are actually more distant than that from the reds of mid-20th century.

Considerably more.

A Republican senator who floated a conspiracy theory which said the Chinese government created Covid-19 in a weapons lab claimed on Saturday that since he first learned of the outbreak, in mid-January, “common sense has been my guide”.

On Saturday, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a foreign policy hardliner, wrote on Twitter: “Since I first learned of the Wuhan coronavirus in mid-January, common sense has been my guide.

“Not Chinese communist lies. Not ‘the models’. Not so-called ‘public-health experts’. Just common sense. Many elected leaders have also been guided by common sense. Others haven’t.”

The virus is believed to have originated in a market in Wuhan in which wild animals were sold. 

But in an appearance on Fox News in February, Cotton floated a conspiracy theory which suggests the virus was manufactured in a Chinese bioweapons facility.