If you blinked, you likely missed it.
Vice President Kamala Harris accused Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during last week’s presidential debate of being too deferential to Chinese leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, she argued the former president should’ve demanded better transparency from Chinese Communist Party officials.
Harris and the debate moderators then moved on to bigger, better things, including discussing Trump’s social media posts.
But let’s stop to review the vice president’s remarks regarding the pandemic. There’s some news there. What she said at the debate marked a stark contrast to how Democratic lawmakers and President Joe Biden’s team, including Harris, approached COVID-19 back when Trump was president and even afterward.
For starters, in the early years of the pandemic, they fiercely opposed most efforts to tie China to the virus, including even the use of shorthand references to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus” and “Wuhan Virus.” Later, after Harris and Biden took the White House, their administration pressured tech companies to censor discussions of the “lab leak” theory, which posits the virus was created in a lab in Wuhan, China.
Yet Harris is now accusing her opponent of dropping the ball on China?
"[W]hat Donald Trump did, let's talk about this with COVID, is he actually thanked President XI for what he did during COVID. Look at his tweet. ‘Thank you, President XI,’ exclamation point," Harris said during the presidential debate.
She added: “When we know that Xi was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of COVID.”
Trump tweeted on Jan. 24, 2020, at the outbreak of the pandemic in the United States: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
This was indeed a stupid thing to say since it’s a solid bet the Chinese Communist Party will always do the most dishonest and duplicitous thing. Yet, let’s review the rest of the story.
Shortly after Trump’s stupid tweet, his administration adopted a much tougher stance on China. The Trump White House imposed a nationwide travel ban from China, which took effect on Jan. 31, 2020, when there were only a handful of confirmed cases in the U.S. The ban applied to non-U.S. citizens who had been in China within 14 days of travel and were not immediately related to a U.S. citizen.
One day after Trump announced the travel restrictions, the Biden campaign pounced, accusing the administration of racism and xenophobia.
“We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus,” the Biden campaign said. “We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”
Later, Trump adopted the habit of referring to the virus by the shorthand “China Virus” and “Wuhan Virus,” linking the outbreak to its specific point of origin. He was condemned at once by the Democratic Party and the press, both of which characterized the terms as racist. Trump was also accused of being personally responsible for acts of violence against Asian Americans.
“Trump's 'Chinese Virus' tweet helped lead to rise in racist anti-Asian Twitter content: Study,” ABC News reported.
Then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the time: "Our Asian-American communities — people YOU serve — are already suffering. They don't need you fueling more bigotry."
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield proclaimed it "absolutely wrong and inappropriate" to call the virus the "Chinese coronavirus."
"This painful rhetoric has consequences," Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) said. "Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, we've seen not only the spreading of the virus but also a rapid spreading of racism and xenophobia."
Biden himself said: “Unfortunately, Donald Trump and his Administration have failed to show almost any moral leadership when it comes to this issue. The casual racism and regular xenophobia that we have seen from Trump and this Administration is a national scourge."
A few days later, Biden accused Trump of failing to hold China accountable.
“Trump trusted China, sent China our supplies, and just look at the mess we're in now,” the Democratic candidate said.
But what about Harris?
As for the then-senator from California, she sponsored a resolution in 2020 denouncing the terms “Wuhan Virus” and “Chinese Virus” as hateful, “anti-Asian” rhetoric. The resolution also said that the use of “anti-Asian terminology and rhetoric related to COVID–19, such as the ‘Chinese Virus,’ ‘Wuhan Virus,’ and ‘Kung-flu,’ have perpetuated anti-Asian stigma.”
Later, in January 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order “condemning and combating racism, xenophobia, and intolerance against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.”
Specifically, the executive order, which was aimed at federal agencies, said that the previous administration had contributed to "xenophobic sentiments" by referring to COVID-19 by its place of origin. The order said that tying China to the pandemic "perpetuated stigma" and "contributed to increasing rates of bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against AAPI persons."
Lastly, and most importantly, the White House pressured tech companies, most notably Meta, Facebook's parent company, to censor posts suggesting the virus was manmade rather than zoonotic and that it had escaped a lab in Wuhan.
The lab leak theory has always been the most plausible and realistic explanation for the virus’s origins. This is likely why China went to such great lengths to squash the theory, including disappearing whistleblowers and barring impartial inspectors from reviewing the lab facilities in Wuhan. And yet, during the final months of the Trump administration and even a little beyond, those who so much as glanced at the theory were written off as loons, cranks, and, yes, racists . (It will never stop being funny that the supposedly acceptable, “non-racist” origins theory was momentarily the one that suggested a bunch of dirty Chinese peasants created the virus by eating wild animals.)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed this year the Biden administration did, in fact, pressure the social media company to censor so-called problematic content, including discussions of the “lab leak” theory and China’s efforts to absolve itself of responsibility for the pandemic.
But hey. Trump tweeted “thank you” to Xi Jinping in January 2020, when relatively few Americans had contracted COVID-19. So, you know, who really failed to hold China accountable?
More infuriating than Harris’s politically expedient about-face is that her remarks at the debate last week went not only unchallenged but also unnoticed. All that ink and all that commentary spent during the early years of the pandemic defending the Chinese Communist Party’s honor, all of it peddled under the dishonest guise of defending Asian Americans, and Harris outright blamed China last week for the pandemic.
And no one cared.
What a difference an administration makes.
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Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and The Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.
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