On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” former National Security Adviser Susan Rice stated that China does deserve some blame for how it handled the coronavirus outbreak, and “China is not behaving well in trying to blame this on the United States. But the flip side of it is, we are not behaving well when we talk about, as the president does every day, the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, and all of these racist descriptions.”

Rice said, “So, there’s a lot of blame to be placed on China in terms of how it handled its processes internally, how they treated their people, how they suppressed information. And certainly, China is not behaving well in trying to blame this on the United States. But the flip side of it is, we are not behaving well when we talk about, as the president does every day, the Chinese virus, the Wuhan flu, and all of these racist descriptions. The fact of the matter is, that viruses don’t know borders. They don’t respect borders. In 2009, the swine flu pandemic that swept the world, that was extremely deadly, in terms of lives ultimately lost, originated in North America. So, we need to get out of the business of blaming people for where viruses arise, which can arise anywhere on the planet, and get into the business of working together to defeat them. And my concern is, with all of the very bad blood now on this topic, among others, between the United States and China, we are not only deflecting from the imperative of getting our own act together here in the United States…but we are race-baiting, and we are making it much more difficult to rally other countries, not just China, but many other countries, to cooperate in this endeavor.”

(h/t Grabien)

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