主题：特朗普这种玩法让美国的“有识之士”也心急如焚啊 -- 红军迷

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Updated 7:55 AM ET, Wed May 6, 2020

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

(CNN)The big lie of the Trump administration is that China is the cause of America's problems. The meme has worked for a while, since it plays into American smugness that if China is succeeding, they must be cheating.

Trump and his right-wing allies upped this game recently by claiming the Covid-19 pandemic was the result of an accidental release from a Chinese laboratory and that China's "cover up" blocked an effective global response.

According to CNN, the still-secret findings of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies (the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) pour cold water on this claim. So too does Trump's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Yet just this past Sunday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asserted, "There is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan."

Such charges by the Trump administration and by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas are reckless and dangerous. They could push the world to conflict just as the Bush Administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq pushed the US into war in 2003.

If the Trump administration's claims are shot down by the intelligence agencies and independent scientific analysis, as now seems likely, they recall the end of McCarthy era. Trump is our present-day Senator Joseph McCarthy, who uses lies and innuendos to scare Americans into submission. McCarthy's notorious lawyer, Roy Cohn, who himself was a pathological liar, was Trump's lawyer and mentor.

McCarthy knew no bounds to his lying, and eventually claimed that the US Army was soft on communists. The Army exposed McCarthy's lies, and in immortal words, the Army's lawyer Joseph Welch ended McCarthy's career. "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness ... You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"

The right-wing charges against China made no sense. First, some on the US right charged that the coronavirus might have been a Chinese bio-weapon, a claim that was quickly shot down by scientists by analyzing the virus. Then they charged that the virus was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with a subsequent cover-up. That too was illogical.

The virus was in circulation in Wuhan for weeks, and eventually killed thousands of Chinese people. In the confusion of the time, Wuhan authorities organized a major New Year's event on January 18 that spread the virus. Why would the Chinese authorities have done that if they knew, and were covering up, a laboratory release from several weeks earlier? The actual answer is almost surely that they were still in the fog of war against the new virus.

In fact, neither the biology nor chronology support the laboratory-release story. Biologists note that the Wuhan lab did not even have the Covid-19 virus under study. The virus is of a kind that originates in bats, but Covid-19 may have had an intermediate mammal host, perhaps one that was traded in the Wuhan live animal market implicated in a majority of the cases with onset before January 1, 2020. The Wuhan market was shut down on January 1 after the initial outbreak. Perhaps we will learn that the earliest human cases were not even in Wuhan at all and were brought to the Wuhan market by an infected individual traveling from Western China.

Aside from the claim of a laboratory release, the administration and the right-wing media also charge that China covered up the outbreak more generally for weeks. Yet consider the record. The doctors in Wuhan first noted unusual cases of viral pneumonia in mid-December. Wuhan health officials notified the World Health Organization office in China on December 31. The China health agency called the US CDC on January 3. The genome was fully sequenced and published online on January 11, and Wuhan was locked down on January 23.

Given the inevitable early confusion about a new disease that had never before been seen, that is a rapid timeline. Were there mistakes? On December 30, Dr. Li Wenliang sent fellow doctors a warning of a new an outbreak that resembled SARS. His brave warning was correct in essence even as the disease turned out to be a new one. Yet the Wuhan Public Security Bureau forced Dr. Li to sign a statement admitting to disturbing the public order.

Tragically, Dr. Li succumbed to the disease in February. In March he was exonerated by a national investigation. Also, the Chinese authorities waited until January 20 to declare definitively that the virus transmitted human to human. This too was a mistake, a tragic delay of several days that may have resulted from an incorrect and unrealistic hope that closing the Wuhan live animal markets would stop the disease, or from more general uncertainties, or a desire not to disrupt the start of the Chinese New Year.

But rather than acknowledging the general rapid timeline culminating in the shutdown on January 23, Trump has played fast and loose with the facts, hitting at China at every turn. But that has been par for the course in Trump's China bashing. For example, the administration has claimed repeatedly that Huawei and other high-tech Chinese companies are direct threats to US security, without providing any direct evidence. That's why America's closest allies such as the United Kingdom and Germany have gone in a different direction, continuing to do business with Huawei and to cooperate more generally with China.

The bottom line on the epidemic and Trump's dismal failure is this. On December 31, 2019, China notified WHO. On January 23, China locked down Wuhan. On January 30, WHO declared a global public health emergency.

As of January 30, there was not yet one single Covid-19 death in the United States. The first is now thought to have occurred on February 6.

Now there are more than 71,000 US deaths.

There was plenty of warning, Messrs. Trump and Pompeo. To this moment, Americans have not fully gauged your recklessness. You have done enough. Have you no shame?

杰弗里·D·萨克斯

美国东部时间2020年5月6日（星期三）上午7:55更新

（CNN）特朗普政府的大谎言是，中国是美国问题的根源。这种文化基因已经运作了一段时间，因为它迎合了美国人的自鸣得意，即：中国如果成功了，那一定是在作弊。

特朗普和他的右翼盟友最近加大了这一游戏的力度，声称“Covid 19”大流行是中国实验室一次意外泄漏的结果，中国的“掩盖”阻止了一场有效的全球反应。

据美国有线电视新闻网报道，五眼情报机构（美国、英国、澳大利亚、新西兰和加拿大）至今仍处于保密状态的调查结果给这一说法泼了一盆冷水。特朗普的首席传染病专家安东尼·福奇博士也是如此。

然而，就在上周日，国务卿迈克·庞皮欧（Mike Pompeo）还坚称，“有大量证据表明，这来自武汉的那个实验室。”

特朗普政府和阿肯色州参议员汤姆·科顿（Tom Cotton）提出的这些指控是鲁莽和危险的。它们可能会将世界推向冲突，就像布什政府在伊拉克大规模杀伤性武器问题上的谎言将美国推入2003年的战争一样。

如果特朗普政府的说法被情报机构和独立的科学分析否决（现在看来很有可能），他们会让人想起麦卡锡时代的终结。特朗普就是我们今天的参议员约瑟夫·麦卡锡，他用谎言和影射恐吓美国人让他们屈服。麦卡锡臭名昭著的律师罗伊·科恩（Roy Cohn）是特朗普的律师和导师，而科恩本人就是一个病态的说谎者。

麦卡锡对自己的谎言没有底线，并最终声称美国军队对共产主义者很软弱。军队揭露了麦卡锡的谎言，军队的律师约瑟夫·韦尔奇用他不朽名言结束了麦卡锡的职业生涯：“参议员，在此之前，我想我从未真正估量过你的残忍和鲁莽……你已经做得够多了。难道你没有一点正义感吗？”

右翼对中国的指责毫无道理。首先，一些美国右翼人士指责说这种冠状病毒可能是一种中国的生物武器，科学家通过分析这种病毒迅速将这种说法驳倒。随后，他们指控病毒是武汉病毒学研究所偶然释放出来的并随后进行了掩盖。这也是不合逻辑的。

该病毒在武汉传播了数周，最终导致数千中国人死亡。在混乱中，武汉当局在1月18日组织了一次大型的新年活动，结果使病毒传播了。如果中国当局知道并掩盖了几周前的一次实验室释放，他们为什么要这样做？实际上，几乎可以肯定的是他们仍然处于对抗新病毒的战争迷雾中。

事实上，无论是生物学还是年代学都不支持实验室释放的说法。生物学家指出，武汉实验室甚至没有研究中的Covid-19病毒。该病毒起源于蝙蝠，但Covid-19可能有一个中间宿主哺乳动物，可能是在武汉活禽市场交易的，涉及2020年1月1日以前发病的大多数病例。在最初的疫情爆发后，武汉市场于1月1日关闭。也许我们会了解到，最早的人类病例甚至根本不在武汉，而是由来自中国西部的感染者带到武汉市场的。

除了实验室释放的声明外，政府和右翼媒体还指责中国在数周内更广泛地掩盖了疫情。但是考虑一下记录。武汉的医生在12月中旬首次发现了病毒性肺炎的罕见病例。12月31日，武汉卫生官员通知了世界卫生组织驻中国办事处。1月3日，中国卫生部门致电美国疾病预防控制中心。1月11日，基因组测序完成并在网上公布，1月23日，武汉被封锁。

考虑到一种以前从未发现过的新疾病在早期不可避免地会引起混乱，这是一个快速的时间轴。有错误吗？12月30日，李文良医生向同行的医生们发出了类似SARS的新疫情爆发的警告。他勇敢的警告在本质上是正确的，即使这种疾病后来被证明是一种新的疾病。然而，武汉公安局强迫李博士签署了一份声明承认扰乱了公共秩序。

不幸的是，李博士在2月份死于这种疾病。今年3月，一项全国性调查宣告他无罪。此外，中国当局一直等到1月20日才明确宣布这种病毒是人传人的。这也是一个错误,一个悲剧性的延迟几天,原因可能是有不正确的和不切实际的希望，以为关闭武汉活动物市场会停止疾病蔓延,或对总体情况不确定,或不希望扰乱中国农历新年的开始。

但是，特朗普并没有承认中国采取迅速行动，直至1月23日封城，而是在事实面前反复无常，动不动就攻击中国。但在特朗普不断抨击中国的过程中这是意料之中的事。例如，美国政府多次声称，华为等中国高科技企业是对美国安全的直接威胁，但没有提供任何直接证据。这就是为什么美国最亲密的盟友，如英国和德国走了不同的方向，继续与华为做生意，并与中国进行更广泛的合作。

关于这场流行病和特朗普令人沮丧的失败，底线是这样的。2019年12月31日中国通报了世卫组织。1月23日中国封锁了武汉。1月30日世卫组织宣布全球进入公共卫生紧急状态。

截至1月30日美国还没有一例Covid 19死亡。第一次发生在2月6日。

现在美国有超过71 000人死亡。

特朗普和蓬佩奥收到了很多警告。到目前为止美国人民还没有完全认清你们的鲁莽。你已经做得够多了。你们难道不知道羞耻吗？