Apparently, blaming China for exporting a deadly virus around the globe, lying about the danger it posed and withholding vital information regarding its origin is now considered racist by polite society.

Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Emergencies Program, said at a news conference, “There is no blame in this. All we need now is to identify the things we need to do to move forward quickly, with speed and to avoid any indication of ethnic or other associations with this virus.”

There you have it — Dr. WHO gives China a clean bill of health!

Oddly enough, so does China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Tiankai wrote, “At a time when solidarity is essential, we need to keep cool heads and clearly say ‘no’ to the folly of fanning racism and xenophobia, and to scapegoating other countries or races. Such acrimony will not only undercut cooperation between our nations, but also sow seeds of suspicion and confrontation that could put our peoples — and even the world — in grave danger from this runaway virus and the economic fallout it is causing.”

I guess we can add “Communist propaganda” to the list of cheap crap that China exports to America.

On the contrary, we absolutely should blame China for its central role in creating this pandemic.

First, its leaders are to blame for lying, and continuing to lie, about how many people in China were infected with the COVID-19 virus and how many ultimately died.

Dr. Deborah Brix, the physician leading the White House response to COVID-19, said at a briefing, “When you looked at the China data originally … you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do a global pandemic.”

She explained it wasn’t until data started coming in from Italy and Spain that our government health officials realized it was far worse “than anyone expected.”

China resisted offers from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to inspect the situation on the ground in the virus’ early days.

Li Wenliang, the Chinese physician who blew the whistle on coronavirus was punished and forced to retract his statements. He later died of COVID-19. Problem solved, I guess.

Even more suspicious, they kicked out journalists from the American press, preventing them from reporting from the epicenter.

China still continues to deny it lied about the coronavirus, but, on the bright side, it just offered us a sweet deal on masks, gloves and respirators.

Next is China’s entirely sketchy story about the origins of the virus.

The government’s official position is that the virus originated in bats, which infected another animal that passed it to humans at a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Yet last week China re-opened its filthy, unsafe, unregulated, germ-infested wet markets. Or as they’re known in China, “markets.”

What dictator in his right mind would do this?

And finally, China is no longer just America’s No. 1 supplier of unsafe toys for children and poisonous pet foods — now it’s expanded into pharmaceuticals!

According to Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine,” China stands to make a lot of money off the pandemic.

“Ninety percent of the core chemicals to make most of those critical drugs come from China. That’s what you’ll be getting in the intensive care unit, if you have coronavirus. We’re depending on China for so much of those core chemicals to make those basic generic drugs that make our hospitals run … we can’t make antibiotics any more in the United States. We can’t make thousands of drugs because of our dependence on China” she told me.

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Mixed messages and conflicting ideas in our pandemic age She also added that the Chinese gained their monopoly through a very deliberate strategy of undercutting the U.S. on price, by forming cartels and dumping product on the global market at below market prices.

When they kicked out most of their competitors, they raised the price.

China deserves to be blamed for this mess. And we need to start making critical goods, like pharmaceuticals, back at home again.

Now that we have Ford, General Motors and even the My Pillow Guy using their factories to make medical devices to defeat the coronavirus, maybe it’s time to start knocking on Walter White’s door too.

John Phillips can be heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on “The John Phillips Show” on KABC/AM 790.