Doctor on Fox falsely claiming ‘we knew’ COVID-19 was ‘person-to-person’ disease in Dec sparks firestorm

(Fox News video screenshots)

A doctor who appeared as a guest on Fox News late Wednesday earned praise from the left and criticism from the right for his attacks on the Trump administration.

Appearing on FNC’s “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” Dr. Rishi Desai of the medical technology company Osmosis blamed the Trump administration for the delayed testing response to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Listen (disable your adblocker if the video doesn’t appear):


(Source: Fox News)

They should have been working on [producing quick coronavirus tests] for months,” he said to host Martha MacCallum. “The fact is we knew about this from the [World Health Organization] when? December 31st, 2019. So last year, we knew about this.”

We knew coronavirus is coming. We knew it was a respiratory disease. We knew it’s person-to-person. Why is it that it’s this week that the FDA finally approves these kind of new Abbott Laboratories testing?

He was wrong.

It was late last week, in fact, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted the medical devices and health care company Abbott Laboratories authority to begin distributing a new coronavirus testing kit that works in as few as five minutes.

Second, the World Health Organization spent months repeatedly providing cover for the Communist Party of China by echoing its since-debunked claims that the coronavirus is nothing to worry about.

Case in point:

WHO didn’t declare coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern” until Jan. 31. A day after the declaration, President Donald Trump “suspended entry into the United States by any foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the past 14 days,” as reported by The New York Times.

At the time, the mainstream media responded by labeling the president’s ban racist or, in the case of the Times, describing it as “more of an emotional or political reaction.”

That assertion turned out to be wrong.

Months later, the same class of left-wingers who were triggered by the president’s travel ban on China are now thrilled by Desai’s decision to blame the Trump administration for what WHO claims has been a slow global response to the coronavirus crisis.

Look:

Conversely, his remarks have provoked criticism from the right.

Look:

Desai continued his statements on FNC by comparing the United States’ coronavirus response to that of South Korea, a significantly smaller nation that’s been more successful in limiting the virus’s spread.

“You look at South Korea and the U.S. had their first official confirmed case on the same date, January 19th,” he said. “You look at what South Korea did and what we did. Their population is one-sixth of ours.”

“Look at the cases they have. Look at the mortality they have. It’s a trifle compared to what we’re dealing with right  now because we’ve had a very weak response and they’ve had a very strong response.”

He was right about South Korea. The Asian nation responded earlier than any other nation on the globe by initiating wide-scale coronavirus testing as early as January.

However, the belief by his fact-free groupies that the Trump administration is alone in its delayed response — and thus effectively responsible for the coronavirus’s spread throughout the entire nation — is laughably false.

It neglects so many facts, including that both the Democrat Party and its left-wing media allies all originally downplayed the threat posed by the virus:

It also ignores the words of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s tried repeatedly to explain to the stubborn press that the blame for the government’s “delayed” response to the crisis lies squarely with China and its communist government.

His latest explanation came Tuesday after a CNN “journalist” asked whether coronavirus death models would have predicted fewer deaths had the Trump administration taken mitigation efforts earlier.

“[I]f there was no virus in the background, there was nothing to mitigate,” he said. “If there was a virus there that we didn’t know about, then the answer to your question is probably yes,” Fauci replied.

Listen:

These remarks were of course ignored by the same media “journalists” who rushed to share Desai’s words and praise him for his alleged truth-telling.

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