Staff members in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the White House has been driven by politics rather than science in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a CNN report revealed on Wednesday. 

A senior CDC official also criticized the Trump administration for focusing on China instead of Europe in early March, allowing large numbers of European travelers to enter the United States when transmissions in Europe were mounting. 

In interviews with CNN, CDC officials said the agency's efforts to address the global outbreak "have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science," the report said. 

"We've been muzzled," said a current CDC official. "What's tough is that if we would have acted earlier on what we knew and recommended, we would have saved lives and money." 

Although the CDC alerted the White House of the rapid spread of the coronavirus on March 2, Trump did not announce strict travel restrictions on more than two dozen European countries until March 11. 

"The White House was extremely focused on China and not wanting to anger Europe ... even though that's where most of our cases were originally coming from," said a CDC official.

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Washington is under criticism for politicizing the pandemic and blame-shifting with its threat to stop funding the World Health Organization (WHO) and repeated attacks on China.

Beijing has denied accusations of a lack of transparency and urged Washington to focus on tackling the coronavirus at home and saving American lives. 

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The formation of a "China Task Force" by House Republicans was one of the latest U.S. moves to target China in areas including but far beyond COVID-19.

Following the announcement of the task force earlier this month, Congressman Michael T. McCaul announced its five pillars on Tuesday: National Security, Technology, Economics and Energy, Competitiveness, and Ideological Competition. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced on May 7 the establishment of a Republican-led task force aimed at conducting probes and making recommendations to combat threats from China.  

"They will be looking at a wide range of China-related issues, including influence operations targeting the U.S. like our universities, think tanks and media outlets, economic threats to our government and our allies, efforts to gain a technological advantage, and our role in the origin and spread of COVID-19," the California Republican said.

Analysts believe that people involved in the task force are trying to secure their political position in an extreme way, at the time when "blaming China" has become "politically correct" in the U.S. political sphere. 

Zhang Tengjun, assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times that with the five pillars covering major confrontation areas between China and the U.S., their next move is to further strengthen and expand hostile policies toward China. 

As Trump and the GOP face challenging elections in November, the task force was established to hype the so-called "China threat" to conceal Trump administration's chaotic management of the coronavirus, said Lyu Xiang, a research fellow on U.S. studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 

"I think we are in a new Cold War," said House Representative Mike Gallagher, one of 15 House Republicans joining the task force, according to a report by the National Review, an American editorial magazine. 

Earlier, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent campaigns a memo authored by a top Republican strategist, advising GOP candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China.   

The detailed 57-page memo includes guiding candidates how to deflect public anger on racism to the "cover-up" of the Chinese government and to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government, accusing them of being "soft on China."

China is hitting back.

"U.S. non-stop disinformation may confuse and mislead some for a while. But in the end facts speak for themselves," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted on Wednesday.

"'Follow me and you live, defy me and you die.' Is this the American style of science and democracy?" Hua asked in a series of tweets. "But history has proven that only by following the trend of the times can one develop and prosper." 

The U.S. is leading the world in COVID-19 infections and deaths, totaling nearly 1.6 million and 95,000 respectively.