While publicly proclaiming that the United States is self-sufficient and would be able to combat the Covid-19 pandemic on its own, behind closed doors, President Donald Trump’s administration has been appealing to its allies for help, according to UK-based The Guardian.

Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020

“We should never be reliant on a foreign country for the means of our own survival, ” the UK portal quoted him as saying at a White House briefing on Tuesday (March 24).

“America will never be a supplicant nation, ” he said.

However behind the scenes, the administration has approached Asian and European partners to secure supplies of testing kits and other medical equipment that are in desperately short supply in the United States, The Guardian said.

On Tuesday, Trump spoke by phone with South Korea President Moon Jae-in, asking if his country could supply medical equipment, it added.

The official White House account made no mention of the request, but according to the South Korean presidency, the Blue House, the call was made at Trump’s “urgent request”.

As of last week, South Korea had tested 270,000 people (one in 19 of the population) since the beginning of the outbreak while the United States has performed 266,000 tests (only one in 1,230) in the past eight days, The Guardian reported.

The UK outlet also noted that earlier this month, German officials said they had fended off a Trump administration offer to buy exclusive access to a potential vaccine being developed by a German company, CureVac.

The newspaper Welt am Sonntag had quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists’ work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, “but only for the United States”.

Source: The Star