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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Nancy Pelosi go to hug people in China town in late Feb 2020?

Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco's Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...

"Fear of the Virus is Racially Motivated."

Around the time the Trump administration announced the travel restriction, Biden said that Trump had a “record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.”

In late January, the Trump administration implemented a travel restriction from China, where the coronavirus originated.

Some on the left described the move as a racist or xenophobic ploy aimed at punishing a country that Trump has clashed with over trade.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/498350-biden-trumps-co...

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I mean, it was true that shutting down the border to China was mostly a policy based on xenophobia than any actual facts, because at that point the vast majority of people spreading Covid into the US werent the Chinese. The huge NYC early spike started from an traveler from Europe.

Yes, despite of all the cover-ups and lyings China is never responsible. And everyone else is responsible for pandemic.

This is unlikely to be true and probably an attempt to rewrite the history based on current knowledge and hate of Trump.

The reality is, that back then, there was simply no better information than "coming from China". It wasn't based on xenophobia at all, just on common sense (that seemed to defy the Democrats / mainstream media). In beginning of March, Trump also closed borders to Europe. Xenophobic? No, Europe was having a spike (e.g. Bergamo, Italy). EU "president", Ursula von der Leyen, criticised the decision. 2 weeks later, EU closed its borders. (Ursula is another person that prefers politics to common sense.)

It actually is true, the US’s SARS-CoV-2 lineages were predominantly from Europe. Especially Italy.

There's some evidence in retrospect that a lot of the spread to the US was from Italy. There wre two huge problems with using that as proof Pelosi and co were right to call the travel bans xenophobic. Firstly, it suggests the US policies basically succeeded at stopping the virus spreading there from China whilst Italy failed (and likely doomed the rest of the world in the process). Secondly, in order to block travel from Italy early enough, the US would've had to do it when Italy was consistently reporting zero cases week after week. Given that pretty much the entire US mainstream media and political insisted that it was xenophobic and unjustified to stop travel from Europe even after there was evidence of a major outbreak, I can't imagine there'd be much support for doing so when Italy reported zero cases and the US had cases from China - even though the reason for that was that Italy was doing worse at detecting outbreaks and those local cases turned out to be much less of a problem than ones from zero-case Italy.

Something seems to have gone really badly wrong in Italy and it's somehow gone entirely unexamined by the media, despite the fact that it did more to doom the rest of the world's efforts than any of the countries that have been blamed for doing so. Entirely unrelately, Italy is lead by the kind of boring technocrat that the media likes rather than some Trumpian populist figure.

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