As we've already discussed here, the right and Republicans have been looking for anyone to scapegoat over the spread of the coronavirus other than Dear Leader Trump, and the viewers were treated to yet another example of that on this weekend's Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Rubio was asked by Bartiromo about the timeline of the Chinese response to the virus, and was more than happy to pile on in attacking them for making this worse, which they have, but was unwilling to utter a single word criticizing Trump for his weeks of denying the pandemic and its severity, delaying testing, calling it a "Democratic hoax," and some sort of evil plot designed to keep him from being reelected.
They knew about this back in December, but still sent this big delegation to the White House to shake everybody's hand to do the Phase I China deal. Then they sent the largest delegation ever to Davos.
What's your take on what we are hearing coming out of China right now and their disinformation campaign and how do we deal with that?
RUBIO: Well, my first take is the the entire planet, every government on earth in every country is badly prepared for this sort of pandemic that were seeing right now, and frankly it's very bad as it is, but it could've been far deadly and far worse. If this is anything like the Spanish flu in terms of mortality we'd be in tremendous amount of trouble.
The Chinese made that far worse because the way you respond to something like that and a global event of that magnitude is, you immediately declare it to the world, bring in all of the experts and you start working, and you try to contain it to a place where it starts. You try to keep it from leaving there and getting to other places.
And instead what Chinese authorities were interested in was their image, they didn't want to look bad. They didn't want to look like they had a problem, and so they covered it up and they punished the people who actually spoke about this openly. And they weren't open to researchers. They didn't share the original virus, or they didn't even disclose human to human transmission until very late in December. And everybody really lost four to six weeks here in responding. We could've been four to six weeks ahead of this had they been more transparent.
That doesn't dissolve us missteps that we've made or people in Europe have made, or someone else has me, but I can tell you it was made tremendously, much harder by not only did the Chinese not disclose it, they bullied a bunch of countries into not cutting off flights, and so these cases got into other countries as well because they didn't do what president Trump did here.
If Bartiromo were an actual reporter instead of a propagandist on the equivalent of state-run TV, this is the timeline she would have been asking Rubio about instead.
