Interview: U.S. pandemic fight a complete failure, says Turkish specialist

ISTANBUL, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- The United States' dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is a total failure as it disregards the lives of its citizens in order to pursue its capitalist interests, a leading Turkish medical specialist has said.

All the data published up to now revealed that the United States has not given the "correct response" to the pandemic since the beginning, Bulent Ertugrul, a specialist on infectious diseases and clinical microbiology from Istanbul-based Reyap Hospital, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"In terms of health policy and the political economy of health, the U.S. has erroneously approached the COVID-19 pandemic. And for this reason, we can say that it played with the lives of its own people," Ertugrul said, noting that the United States ranked first in the world in terms of both caseload and death toll.

Data revealed by Johns Hopkins University on Monday showed that the United States is the hardest-hit country by the pandemic, with nearly 93 million COVID-19 cases and over 1.03 million fatalities. In the last 28 days, the country recorded 3.36 million new cases.

"The implementation of that savage capitalism in the United States took people's lives, and hundreds of thousands of people died," Ertugrul said.

In the Western capitalist world, the pandemic is "unfortunately" no longer a "public health problem" but an individual issue as they gradually removed all the pandemic-related measures, considering their economic worries, he said.

"As a result, people are getting COVID-19, and they are trying to get treatment (by their own means) and we are even experiencing new waves," he said.

The specialist pointed out that the health system in the United States has a class-based structure as the disease ultimately affected working-class citizens the most.

The United States has been facing a number of internal problems, such as rising gun violence and high inflation. However, instead of finding solutions to them, it usually aims to distract the attention of its citizen by creating other agendas, according to the specialist.

"Playing to the perception, constructing misinformation, are the things that bourgeois politicians do very well for all eternity. In that sense, it is necessary to laugh at them," he said.

"The United States of America sees itself as the leader in this world in the establishment and perpetuation of imperialism. And if it perceives a (so-called) political threat to this (its hegemony) the U.S. considers itself responsible and accountable for producing and incriminating policies against that source."