Washington spoiler in cooperation against outbreak

The United States administration has been telling one-sided stories about its fight against the novel coronavirus, and highlighting the country's advantages in technology, while belittling other countries' anti-pandemic measures and the importance of international cooperation, turning the pandemic into a competition.

In spite of accounting for the highest numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths in the world, the White House has been spreading propaganda that the US is a leading science and technology power and therefore enjoys advantages in virus testing, treatment, and vaccine development and application. The White House has also tried to stop governments from buying Chinese testing equipment, and claimed other countries hacked into US systems to steal the research results.

In its populist stories, the US administration has skipped over the fact that global technology cooperation has unprecedentedly deepened amid the pandemic. The Global Vaccine Summit on June 4, hosted by the United Kingdom, raised $8.8 billion from 62 donor governments and 12 foundations, corporations and organizations to help Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to immunize more than 300 million children against infectious diseases and support the global fight against COVID-19.

Research organizations, the Global Research Council for instance, have urged openness and sharing of research findings and data to propel the development of diagnostics, vaccines and prevention measures. High-tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, TikTok and WeChat teamed up with the World Health Organization for a "hackathon" to develop anti-coronavirus software. And multinational companies including IBM, Seagate and Canon have signed different initiatives to pledge open intellectual property to help strengthen the fight against COVID-19.

But the US administration omitted the reports about the active participation of US companies in global collaboration and Sino-US cooperation in the fight against COVID-19.

Worse, Washington spread fake news about Beijing during the most difficult phase of China's fight against the virus, including calling the novel coronavirus the "Chinese virus", although American experts and scientists refuted such baseless claims.

According to a study, "Consolidation in a crisis: Patterns of international collaboration in early COVID-19 research", published in the journal PLOS ONE, "the United States and China were, and continue to be in the pandemic era, at the center of the global network in coronavirus related research" and "strengthen their bilateral research relationship during COVID-19, producing more than 4.9% of all global articles together, in contrast to 3.6% before the pandemic". But thanks to its political motives, the White House has been trying to turn public attention away from global cooperation.

The White House's first motive is to cover up the fact that the administration's anti-scientific decisions led to the record numbers of infections and deaths in the US. But no matter how hard the White House boasts that the US will defeat the pandemic, it should be held responsible for disregarding the warnings and suggestions of the scientific community, and disseminating confusing and misleading information on pandemic prevention and control, including promoting medicines without scientific verification.

If the US leads the world in scientific and technological development, how come it accounts for most infections and deaths in the world? As the numbers of infections and deaths have kept rising, breaking records daily, it seems the US has missed the window for strengthening prevention and control measures to contain the pandemic.

Besides, the administration is trying to shift public attention away from the fact that the "America first" policy impeded the US' pandemic-control work, because when the virus was rapidly spreading across the world, the White House was busy using its trade protectionist and unilateral policies to browbeat other countries, and attacking the World Health Organization－ultimately quitting itand ignoring the Global Vaccine Summit, instead of cooperating with the rest of the world to boost the global fight against the virus and strengthening measures to contain the pandemic at home.

Brazil and India took measures similar to the US'. As a result, the coronavirus has wreaked havoc in the two countries. The US, Brazil and India are the worst-hit countries.

Experience shows that collective wisdom is the only way to help the world defeat the virus. Yet the US has not realized the importance of exchanging information and learning from the experiences of other countries.

The White House has blamed other countries as well as the WHO for the spread of the virus in the US. The administration has also portrayed the US as a victim of various frame-ups by other countries and their mistakes. The White House has blamed China and equal racial rights protests, practically every other country and organization except the US administration, for the raging pandemic in the US. If the White House continues to ignore the fact that domestic problems and the administration's errors of judgment led to the rising public complaints and social division in the US, it will cause more damage to the country.

Since changing policies and joining the global cooperation mechanisms will draw public attention back to the administration's failures, the White House seems hell-bent on not changing its buck-passing policy. But it is high time it realized that global cooperation has helped all countries including the US.

The author is an assistant research fellow at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.