New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has said that China cannot fulfill its agenda of global domination by passing out masks to people, ‘many of which turned out to be defective’.
Thomas Friedman said, “China can only lead if it unmasks the truth about where the coronavirus came from. Did it accidentally leak from a laboratory in Wuhan or did it, most likely, come out of a wet market in China.”
Thomas Friedman, who is a foreign affairs expert, said that China should have banned its wet markets after the Sars outbreak in 2003.
The wet markets in China sell wildlife along with domesticated beef. These markets, as per Thomas Friedman, “create ample opportunities for the zoonotic diseases to jump from wildlife – which acquired and codeveloped with these viruses in the wild – and is then ingested by the human beings.”
“It [wet markets] is a terrible practice. China owes the world an explanation, and it cannot mask that by giving the world masks,” Thomas Friedman said.
Thomas Friedman urged China to give assurance that it will end the practices which lead to zoonotic diseases because the world needs China as a collaborator to get back on its feet.
But will this pandemic be a point in history where the United States concedes the role of global leader to China?
Thomas Friedman says he can’t say. “I think if we use this crisis to invest in our resilience and productivity again, use it to go massively into green technologies – because after all this pandemic is just a warm-up for climate change – use it bring manufacturing in the US, American can come out of it stronger,” Thomas Friedman said.
