US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leaves a press conference at the State Department in Washington DC, on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

In a continued effort to launch vicious attacks on China, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday made a big deal of "threats" posed by the Communist Party of China (CPC) during a news conference after a video teleconference with his counterparts from G7 countries. He claimed the CPC threatens the West's health and way of life, urging every country to work together to protect the UN and other organizations from China's "malign influence and authoritarianism." 

Pompeo's radical remarks are a continuation of his Cold War mindset toward China and attempt to scapegoat China for the US' poor handling of the COVID-19 epidemic. To his embarrassment, his proposal to refer to the coronavirus as "Wuhan virus" was rejected by other G7 leaders, leading the conference to end without a joint statement. 

It's believed the peoples of both China and the US as well as the international community have already had a judgment over which government - the Chinese or the US -- performs better and who deserves more criticism in terms of responses to the epidemic. To know how Washington has undermined the American people's health and played a negative role in the global coronavirus fight, we have summarized several blunders made by the US.  

First of all, dereliction of duty by the US government amid the coronavirus outbreak has led to a lack of transparency and preparedness, which has made the epidemic spiral out of control. The slow response by Wuhan in the early stage of the epidemic was also partly because of inadequate understanding of the novel coronavirus and its risks, in addition to local officials' problem. But as China fully exposed its situation to the world, the US should have known the severity of the coronavirus well. The US federal government with politicians like Pompeo assuming important positions holds major responsibility for US carelessness and inaction.  

It can be recalled that the Trump administration downplayed the epidemic for weeks and claimed it was Democrats' "hoax." For a long time, the US Centers for Disease control and Prevention failed to know the accurate situation of the outbreak or provide any reliable virus test, leaving Americans and the rest of world unclear of how many people were infected in the US. The number of new infected cases passed 10,000 in the US on Wednesday, with more than 200 new coronavirus-related deaths. The situation is totally different from what the US leadership has described.

Second, as the world's most powerful country and the leader of the West, the US is expected to aid the Western world, but it failed such expectations. Washington has paid nothing but lip-service. Can Pompeo brief us on how the US helped its allies Italy and Spain? 

Third, in addition to its inability in epidemic prevention and international aid, Washington has become a trouble-maker rather than a boost to international cooperation. The US has been obsessed with attacking China's system. Politicians like Pompeo don't care about the epidemic as much as containing China. The rapid change in the situation is unthinkable for them - China has put the virus under control while the US is severely hit. Hence, they have intensified their evil tricks to deceive Americans by attacking China more fiercely. 

The whole world hopes to see China-US cooperation to combat COVID-19. It can be said that the pandemic cannot be contained without cooperation between the two largest economies. Beijing has been willing to carry out such cooperation but Washington has repeatedly refused.

Engaging in a war of words won't result in cooperation between China and the US. Both sides have lowered their voice in the past few days, but Pompeo escalated once again the tensions by slandering China during the G7 foreign ministers' meeting.

Pompeo and other US elites must be responsible for damaging superpower cooperation if the pandemic worsens, while China cannot join hands with the US due to the war of words. Politicians like Pompeo focus too much on their personal political interests. They will eventually be remembered as negative role models in the history of mankind's battle against COVID-19.