OPINION

The Other Virus To Fear

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

There's a virus threatening the health of America, all right.

But it's not new, not from a foreign country and it's not the coronavirus.

The virus Americans need to fear the most today is the political left.

The Pelosi-Schumer Democrats and their permanently distraught soulmates in the Trump-hating liberal mainstream media are trying harder than ever to hurt the president at every turn.

The president has been doing his best to protect us from the coronavirus without sowing panic in the streets and in the toilet paper aisle at Costco.

He acted decisively in late January when he shut down travel from China, where the virus apparently was born late last year.

This week he announced a temporary ban on travel to the U.S. for most Europeans - and rightly so, because their governments had not acted quickly enough to block the spread of the virus to their countries from China.

But no matter what Trump does or doesn't do, the left and the liberal media try to blame him for infecting the entire world.

Covid-19 is obviously a serious national health problem that will only get worse as many more older and already sick people get infected and have to be treated.

It's already slammed the economy, crashed the stock market, closed college campus, forced sports leagues to cancel or suspend their seasons, crushed the oil and travel industries, spooked local politicians and turned airports, malls and other parts of America into ghost towns.

But unlike previous deadly viruses like the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, Covid-19 is being politicized and weaponized by the left.

You probably don't remember the details of the swine flu, which infected 60 million Americans and killed over 12,000 without panicking everyone and wrecking the economy.

That's because President Obama and his administration were not blamed for the virus by Republicans or a biased and hysterical media.

Plus the media did not over-play the swine flu pandemic 24/7 as it slowly spread, peaked and then died away.

The media coverage of this dangerous virus is semi-hysterical and has a much different spin - a partisan one.

Over at CNN and MSNBC, they're virtually asking why the president hasn't personally cured the coronavirus yet and charging that he doesn't care about people dying at all.

That's sub-par for the course for the hardcore Trump-hating media.

Meanwhile, you'd think Democrats in Congress would, just once, think of the good of the entire country and work with Republicans.

But no.

Democrats have made it clear they don't want to work together with Republicans on anything if Trump is taking the lead on it.

They don't like how Trump is handling things, but of course they can't come up with anything better. All they can think of doing is finding new things to blame on the president.

But if they want to fix blame on someone who deserves it, let them fix it on our brilliant leaders who gave China the authority to make almost all of our antibiotics.

We've been yelling and screaming about becoming oil independent for decades. We finally did it - and now we find out we're not pill independent?

We actually turned over the manufacture of our pills to a Communist country that lies and steals from us.

Whose brainstorm was that? Republicans or Democrats, I don't care. It's outrageous.

Thanks to them, now the older generation who is most likely to die from the effects of the Covid-19 have to get the pills they need from the same country that manufactured the virus.