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“Our children have been the target of bullying and abuse in the district long before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but this abuse has increased dramatically over the past 14 months and reached levels that have attracted media attention on our doors, ”the letter continued. “Our children are your children’s classmates, friends and neighbors.”
The letter to the lieutenant governor was signed by nearly 70 members and families of the Asian community of Upper Arlington, a suburb of Columbus.
He came in response to a March 26 tweet in which Husted linked to an article in which Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, without citing evidence, that he believed the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan. .
“So it looks like it was the Wuhan virus after all?” Husted tweeted from his personal account on Friday.
His intention with the tweet, Husted said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier Wednesday, was to criticize the Chinese government.
“I was just pointing out that this is an international crisis, in my opinion, for which the Chinese government is responsible and I wanted an independent investigation,” he said. “So I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything that the political left or the political right thinks I might have from this tweet other than to draw attention to the issue.”
The claim that COVID-19 originated from a Wuhan lab came under close scrutiny last year by health officials, including America’s leading infectious disease specialist Dr Anthony Fauci.
The claim was further confused when a draft obtained by the AP on Monday and officially released on Tuesday from the World Health Organization investigation said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus would accidentally emerge. from a Chinese lab and likely spread from animals to humans.
Some replies to the original post support Husted for standing up for China. There were more critical responses from Twitter users who said such rhetoric fueled hatred and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
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