Washington – Former US President Barack Obama on Saturday criticized the response to the coronavirus pandemic, assuring that he has made it clear that “the people in command” do not “know what he is doing”, in a veiled attack on his government. successor Donald Trump.
“More than anything, this pandemic has completely and finally exposed the idea that the people in charge know what they are doing,” Obama said in a joint virtual graduation speech to several universities with traditionally African-American students in the States.
“Many of them are not even pretending to be in charge,” he added without mentioning the current president at any time.
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Obama, who has tried to stay out of the political news with few public appearances since leaving the presidency in 2017, has recently raised his profile in view of the approaching November presidential elections, last week described the response of the White House as a “chaotic mess”.
For his part, Trump hinted on Thursday that his predecessor is to blame for the fact that the United States did not have enough masks and fans at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
In those elections, scheduled for early November, Democratic candidate Joe Biden will seek to defeat the current Republican president, who will try to achieve his second term.
This Saturday, the first African-American president in the history of the United States indicated that the coronavirus crisis has highlighted “the underlying inequalities and additional burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country.”
“We see him in disproportionate impact of the covid-19 in our communities, as well as when a black man goes to run, and others feel that they can stop him and question and shoot if he does not fold to his interrogation,” he said.
Obama was referring to the murder of Ahamaud Arbery, a young black athlete killed last February when he was allegedly mistaken for a thief in Georgia, an incident that has sparked outrage in the country for its racist implications.
“These injustices are not new. What is new is that a large part of your generation has woken up to the fact that it is necessary to fix the status quo, that the old ways of doing things do not work, that no matter how much money you earn if everyone around you is hungry and sick, “he said.
The United States, the current focus of the pandemic, reached this Saturday the number of 1,463,350 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the 88,447 deaths, according to the independent count of Johns Hopkins University.
