US' anti-science hubris self-harming: China Daily editorial

To date, the United States has reported more than 35 million cumulative novel coronavirus infections and over 628,000 deaths from COVID-19, leading the world on both counts. The US obviously needs to do some serious soul-searching as to how it has come to this sorry pass.

Ultimately, these figures, the heart-wrenching loss of lives in particular, serve as condemnation of the present and previous administrations' inept responses to the pandemic. Rather than being guided by science and reason, first the Donald Trump administration and now the Joe Biden administration have let political motivations disastrously dictate their responses to this public health threat.

At the beginning of the pandemic last year, the Trump administration chose to ignore the severity of the deadly virus and knowingly downplayed the threat in order to avoid shutting down the economy ahead of the presidential election. As the situation deteriorated, it resorted to spreading conspiracy theories and stigmatizing China as the origin of the virus rather than shouldering its responsibility to follow and implement the scientific advice on how best to contain the virus.

Top US politicians, Trump included, not only called it the "China virus" many times but also misled the public by alleging that the epidemic would fade away with the arrival of warmer weather and that if people injected bleach it would kill the virus.

Such rhetoric was symptomatic of the administration's rejection of science and common sense, which led to the attempts to discredit some of the country's leading scientists, including Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert, who received death threats for siding with science and the evidence.

After the new administration under Joe Biden took office, the US has accelerated its vaccination program. The high vaccination rate has prompted US states and cities to completely lift COVID-19 prevention and control measures, with the White House even announcing last month that the country is "closer than ever" to declaring "independence" from the deadly virus.

But the rampancy of the Delta variant across the world and rebounding of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US all indicate the US has let its guard down too early, as evidenced in Fauci's remark that "We're going in the wrong direction" in an interview with CNN last month.

Yet, instead of listening to the scientific advice and responding to the Delta variant in a more effective way, some US politicians have chosen to ignore the tragedy unfolding before their eyes and, worse, are trying to hijack the world's anti-pandemic agenda so they can stage a witch hunt against China.

Apart from hyping the so-called lab-leak conspiracy theory in tracing the origins of the deadly virus and coercing the World Health Organization to conduct a so-called second phase COVID-19 origin-tracing study in China, the White House has even gone to such absurd lengths as to entrust the serious scientific work of virus tracing to its intelligence agencies, which will no doubt further propagate the US' prevailing anti-science sentiments.