Pompeo, the secretary of state, seems to be — to have carte blanche to do whatever he wants.
He’s not consulting other agencies before
acting.
And so he has basically banned, not only a
travel ban on people coming from China to
the United States, but he’s conflated our
immigration policy with a travel issue, so
that if you’re a Chinese citizen now, you
can’t come to the United States.
Most Americans don’t realize they’ve essentially
used this epidemic to stop all travel and movement.
And one of the outcomes of that, which is
just incredibly nuts, is that almost all of
the active pharmaceutical ingredients used
in the formulation of medicines in America
— frankly, for the whole world — come
from China.
And so, we will soon run out of drugs for
everything.
Has nothing to do with the epidemic.
We’re going to run out of diabetes drugs
and heart disease drugs and cancer drugs and
all of that, many of which were already in
short supply, because the ingredients our
pharmaceutical industry uses all come from
China.
And what’s going to happen to all of those
drugs being made in China?
Who knows?
There’s no answer.
There’s no solution.
And now the tension between the United States
and China has gotten so high that the Foreign
Ministry issued statements today declaring
that America is responsible for a global xenophobic
attack against China, in no uncertain terms.
It’s very clear that inside China it’s
already beginning to play as “America is our enemy.
America is making it worse for us.”
What do you think of, on Thursday, the U.S.
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross appearing
to welcome the coronavirus as a boost to the
U.S. job market, saying in a Fox News interview
that it would, quote, “accelerate the return
of jobs to North America”?
Well, that was an ill-advised comment, to
say the least.
And, look, we’re going to have other comments
of a similar tone.
We, right now here in New York City, have
three suspected cases of this virus.
All involve individuals who had recently been
in China.
All over the United States, we’re seeing
cases of individuals that have been in China,
and many of them are ethnic Chinese.
So you may feed a kind of racial response,
a kind of xenophobia, that is always in America
just, you know, this close to the surface.
Give it a little scratch, and, boom, out comes
the racism.
So, I think we’re in very dangerous territory
right now, where we need not only infrastructure
guidance, but moral guidance, in how to respond
to a frightening epidemic.
