In full agreement, and anyone rejecting that sound reasoning is most likely an anti-Trump malcontent…
Now Is Exactly the Time to Investigate the WHO’s Catastrophic Public Failures and Internal Rot
President Trump made precisely the right call in suspending U.S. funding to the World Health Organization, pending a review of its role in “severely mismanaging and covering up the coronavirus.” Trump is doing an important service not only to America, but to the world, with his demands that the WHO clean up its abysmal and misleading act, and stop kowtowing to China.
But here comes the chorus of alarms that this particular moment, in the midst of the worst pandemic since 1918, is not the time to interrupt the WHO’s annual intake of roughly $500 million from U.S. taxpayers. Bill Gates, a big backer of the WHO, declares the United Nations health agency irreplaceable. A Beijing government spokesman proclaims that Trump’s decision will weaken the WHO and “undermine international cooperation.” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opines that the WHO is “absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against COVID-19” and any review of the WHO should wait till “we have finally turned the page on this epidemic.”
Don’t fall for it. The Hippocratic Oath enjoins doctors to do no harm, and the WHO Constitution includes similiar requirements of the director-general and his staff. But today’s WHO has done harm on a pandemic scale, misleading the world with its rotten assurances (“no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission“), its perverse prescriptions (“WHO advises against the application of any restrictions of international traffic“) and its paeons to China’s ruinous fictions and totalitarian ways (“China deserves gratitude and respect“).
Nor does it excuse the WHO that the prime culprit of today’s pandemic is China’s ruling Communist Party. China reported the Wuhan outbreak to the WHO on Dec. 31, but for almost three more weeks downplayed the evident dangers, stifled the warnings of Wuhan’s terrified doctors and hid the alarming signs of exponential spread in Wuhan until travelers leaving China had richly seeded infections abroad. Either the WHO was clueless, or complicit –neither scenario reflects well on the WHO’s deceptive drumbeat, for weeks, that this novel coronavirus was no threat to the rest of the planet.
As the disease spread, the WHO put out a stream of misinformation, including the now-infamous Jan. 14 message on Twitter that Chinese authorities had found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” Even after China admitted on Jan. 20 that the disease was highly contagious among humans, even after China on Jan. 23 forcibly locked down the entire city of Wuhan, Tedros and his team delayed sounding a serious alarm. It wasn’t until Jan. 30, a week after the Wuhan lockdown, and following Tedros’s lightning trip to Beijing to pay court to China’s tyrant, President Xi Jinping, that the WHO finally declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
