letter obtained by the local NBC affiliate<\/a> read.<\/p>\nJon Husted has been Ohio’s second highest-ranking official since 2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur children have been targeted for bullying and abuse in the district well before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but that abuse has increased significantly in the last 14 months and has reached levels that have brought news media attention to our doorsteps,\u201d the letter continued. \u201cOur children are the classmates, friends, and neighbors of your children.\u201d<\/p>\n
The letter to the lieutenant governor was signed by nearly 70 members and families of the Asian community in Upper Arlington, a suburb of Columbus.<\/p>\n
It came in response to a March 26 tweet where Husted linked to an article in which Robert Redfield, the ex-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, without citing evidence, that he believed the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it appears it was the Wuhan Virus after all?\u201d Husted tweeted Friday from his personal account.<\/p>\n
His intention with the tweet, Husted said in an interview with The Associated Press earlier on Wednesday, was to criticize the Chinese government.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just pointing out that this is an international crisis, in my opinion, that the Chinese government is responsible for and I wanted an independent investigation,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I wasn\u2019t trying to accomplish anything that the political left or political right thinks that I might have from that tweet other than to draw attention to the issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
The claim that COVID-19 originated in a lab in Wuhan has been scrutinized in the past year by health officials, including the leading U.S. infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.<\/p>\n
The claim was further muddied when a draft obtained by The AP on Monday and formally published Tuesday from the World Health Organization\u2019s inquiry said it was \u201cextremely unlikely\u201d that the virus emerged accidentally from a Chinese laboratory and was likely spread from animals to humans.<\/p>\n
Some replies on the original post supported Husted for standing up to China. More numerous were critical replies from Twitter users who said such rhetoric feeds into hate and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.<\/p>\n
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Source: Politics COLUMBUS, Ohio \u2014 Dozens of Asian American residents of the suburb that Ohio\u2019s Republican lieutenant governor calls home penned a letter to him Wednesday, citing their concerns over… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4889"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}