US should look to fix own problems rather than causing them elsewhere: China Daily editorial

Due to the two parties' divergences on its distribution, the United States Senate rejected $15.6 billion in funding for COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control in a government funding bill US President Joe Biden signed on Tuesday last week.

With nearly 1 million COVID-19 deaths and cumulative infections of more than 81 million, the US, with 4.45 percent of the world population, counts for 17 percent of the COVID-19 infections and 16 percent of the COVID-19 deaths worldwide, making it the worst-hit country.

As such, it is easy to understand why the decision to reject the COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control funding in the bill has irked many in the country, as it serves to expose the extent to which US politicians are willing to sacrifice people's health and life for their narrow ends, if not the interests of partisan politics.

The Biden administration had initially requested $30 billion, only to reduce it to $22.5 billion and, finally, to $15.6 billion. But even with the amount halved, Republicans were unwilling to authorize more money without cuts elsewhere or a full accounting from the Biden administration of the already approved virus funding.

The decision laid bare to the world how political interests can ride roughshod over people's lives in a country that often lectures others on human rights. Partisan factionalism and political polarization are worsening the social ills in the country, dragging the US into a dangerous situation.

The US' dealing with the novel coronavirus over the past two years, ranging from vaccination to the allocation of pandemic prevention and control funding, has always been abducted by politics.

As the US Government Accountability Office has pointed out, the US Department of Health and Human Services has failed to play its due role in the response to the outbreak, displaying "persistent deficiencies", including unclear federal, state and regional roles and responsibilities, failure to properly collect and analyze epidemic data, lack of transparency and lack of communication with the public.

To some extent, the pandemic has exposed, if not enlarged, the institutional loopholes in the US political system which has enabled power holders to become increasingly fearless and shameless in shirking their responsibilities, and manipulating public opinion for their own interests.

The US still has a long way to go to normalize social life. And if, as some experts warn, new variants of the virus appear over the next 12 months, about 80 percent of the US population will be infected, and even if the death rate is lowered to 0.1 percent, another 264,000 lives will be lost by March next year.

When asked on Thursday why the COVID relief funding is absent from the aforementioned bill, Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, who was visibly annoyed by that, said "people are dying in the Ukraine and all of that".

Yeah, but people are dying of COVID too, as the reporter shot back.