Harris Poll: 77 Percent of Americans Blame China for Pandemic

A man wearing a mask carries items he bought at a supermarket in Wuhan, China on March 30, 2020. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

A survey from Harris Poll on Wednesday shows that 77 percent of Americans nationally blame the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the spread of the virus.

The belief was echoed across the political spectrum (pdf), with 67 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 90 percent of Republicans attributing the CCP virus to the Chinese regime.

Another 71 percent said Americans companies should pull back from manufacturing their products in China, 69 percent said they believe President Donald Trump should persist in his tough trade stance against the regime, and 54 percent said the CCP needs to pay reparations to other countries due to the pandemic.

More than 400,000 Americans have fallen ill with the COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and about 13,000 have died.

Chinese health officials detected the virus in Hubei Province in late 2019, but instead of immediately reporting the novel coronavirus to the World Health Organization (WHO), the regime apparently waited for weeks to make the epidemic known. Trump administration officials and other world health experts believe the delay in reporting the virus allowed COVID-19 to spread quickly from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, to the rest of China before becoming a worldwide pandemic.

A medical staff member (C) walks at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan, China on January 24, 2020. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

It wasn’t until Jan. 23 of this year that the CCP implemented its first containment measure in Wuhan. What’s more, doctors, including Li Wenliang, who reported the severity of the virus early on were detained and rebuked by the CCP. Li reportedly succumbed to the disease in February, although netizens and citizen journalists in China expressed suspicions about his cause of death.

James Kraska, chair and Charles H. Stockton Professor of international maritime law in the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College, told The Epoch Times last month that the CCP will have to bear the responsibility.

“The People’s Republic of China is a treaty party to the International Health Regulations … which almost every country in the world is a party to,” Kraska told the Epoch Times. “And that treaty requires states to be very forthright or forthcoming, to expeditiously share information on a broad category of diseases, including new influenza-like illnesses, such as the coronavirus.”

Following the outbreak in Wuhan, residents said they are skeptical of the official death toll, saying it could be at least 10 times higher than officially reported.

“It can’t be right ... because the incinerators have been working round the clock, so how can so few people have died?” an Wuhan resident surnamed Zhang told Radio Free Asia last month. “They started distributing ashes and starting interment ceremonies on Monday,” he said.

According to RFA, some have estimated that around 46,000 people died from the virus, far higher than the 2,500 deaths that were counted by the regime.

As the virus has spread worldwide, the regime has reported fewer and fewer cases and deaths, which experts also said is not credible, adding that the CCP is using the virus to spread disinformation.