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  • 2020-03-31 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Trump Administration Send 18 Tons of PPE to China in Early 2020? (en)
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  • During the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic in March 2020, social media users began sharing a tweet ostensibly posted by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that castigated U.S. President Donald Trump for supposedly having sent 18 tons of personal protective equipment (PPE) to China while ignoring warnings and calling COVID-19 concerns a hoax. Readers wanted to know both if Waters had actually tweeted those words, and whether the content of that tweet was true: The authorship of the tweet is easily verifiable, as it appears on the timeline of Waters' Twitter account: It is also true that on Feb. 7, 2020, while critics contended that the Trump administration was doing relatively little to prepare for the coming pandemic in the U.S., the State Department announced it had facilitated the transportation of nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies to the Chinese people, including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials in order to help contain and combat the novel coronavirus: This same topic was also the subject of a CNN editorial published on the same day as Waters' tweet, which criticized Trump for allowing the transfer of PPE to China even after at least a dozen cases of COVID-19 had been discovered in the U.S.: As we covered in a separate article, it is not true that Trump literally dismissed the coronavirus itself as a hoax. He did, however, liken the Democrats' criticism of his administration's response to the new coronavirus outbreak to their efforts to impeach him, saying this is their new hoax — while seemingly downplaying the potential severity of the outbreak by comparing it to the common flu and claiming the press was in hysteria mode: Some defenders have argued that the Trump administration's cooperation in sending donated supplies to the part of the world with the largest number of coronavirus cases at the time (China) was the most effective way of combating the outbreak, while critics have maintained that those supplies should have been kept on hand for use during the inevitable spread of the coronavirus to America. Given that some of the supplies had been donated by the American private sector, it's unclear what would have happened to them had the U.S. State Department declined to facilitate their transportation to China, and whether that action ultimately saved or cost more lives in the U.S. is not possible to determine at this point. But for what it's worth, the Canadian government was likewise criticized for sending supplies to China for the same reasons: (en)
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