U.S. And China’s Lack of Transparency Accusations Hinder Global Efforts against Coronavirus
Keywords: Economy, Global Economy, Economic News
Metadescription: Global efforts in fighting the coronavirus pandemic might be delayed by the ongoing lack of transparency blames games between China and the U.S., while the global economy continues to suffer.
Summary: The U.S. and China continue to fight about the lack of transparency about the Coronavirus Epidemic, with analysts speculating that this is will have further dire effects on the global economy and delay further agreements towards ending their ongoing trade wars.
Twitter: Is it more important for the U.S. and China to determine who is to blame for Coronavirus rather than find a global solution and save lives?
As the U.S. and China continue to throw blame games against each other, their ties have deteriorated to their worst record in history, as both countries continue to accuse each other of a lack of transparency about the Coronavirus pandemic.
According to James Crabtree, Associate Professor at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, the U.S. and China are engaging in a “grand exercise in blame-shifting.
“U.S. and China relations are at their worst point in living memory for a number of decades probably since the 1970s, at the moment there’s a grand exercise in blame-shifting going on, on both sides.”
In a time when worldwide economic news report dire states of individual economies and the global economy, the two most influential world economies continue to jibe at each other with accusations.
U.S. And China Are Accusing Each Other Of Lack of Transparency about the Coronavirus Pandemic
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is accusing China-the the epicenter of the breakout- of lack of transparency in their official data reports about coronavirus infections and mortality rates.
In March 2020, President Trump accused China of being lax in reporting the first outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, claiming the U.S. would have been able to respond much sooner.
“It would have been much better if we had known about this a number of months earlier,” Trump said in a white house conference.
Furthermore, Trump said that Beijing’s tally of the Coronavirus infection and death rates was a “little bit on the light side” after U.S. Intelligence reports from China said the Chinese government was underreporting the correct figures on purpose.
“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming. Stated Vice President Mike Pence on CNN. “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.”
On the other hand, Beijing retaliated by saying the U.S. might be the original source of COVID-19. So far, instead of the countries responding to each other’s accusations, they have opted to shift the blame instead.
On March 12, China’s foreign ministry’s spokesman Zhao Lijian blamed the U.S. military for bringing the Coronavirus to Wuhan.
“When did patient Zero begin in the U.S.? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be the U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data.US owe us an explanation.”
Blame Games Are Interfering With Global Efforts to Fight COVID-19
The U.S. also said that China isn’t the only country deliberately reporting false data sets. Other countries, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, might also be purposely misinforming the public.
Commenting on the data from China, the U.S. state department’s immunologist, Deborah Birx, said that the medical community read the Data from China as serious but less than expected. She added:
“Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
Such false data and back and forth blame-shifting stands in the way of collaborative efforts for the international community to come up with a solution or vaccine for the ongoing global pandemic, Crabtree added.
“Everything is made more difficult by the fact that the U.S. and China are not going to cooperate with one another,” Crabtree said.
The Blame Games Will Also Worsen the Ongoing U.S. and China Trade Wars
The latest data from Johns Hopkins University show that China so far has recorded 83,849 Coronavirus cases, compared to the currently world-leading 787,960 cases in the U.S.
Despite the current accusations of lack of transparency, both countries have cooperated well in past epidemics by sharing information.
Apart from setting back global efforts for a solution against COVID-19, the growing rift will further strain the already hostile trade relations which went on for the better part of 2019.
In January, the U.S. and China reached their first step at achieving an agreement by signing the phase one trade deal with talks of a second deal, a short while after the WHO declared the Coronavirus Outbreak in China.
However, with the current developments, James Crabtree said the phase two is far from being achieved.
“There probably will be some delays in the first phase agreement. It could be years away…They would have to start effectively from the scratch.”