President claims World Health Organization sides with China.
By John Friend
The World Health Organization (WHO), led by the former Ethiopian health and foreign minister and long-time global public health technocrat Ghebreyesus Adhanom Tedros, has come under fire for its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, mostly from those who are defending President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus situation and his decision to suspend the U.S. portion of funding for the globalist organization. Tedros is the first non-physician to head the WHO.
Leftist news outlets and those who want to criticize the president every time he takes a breath have instead praised every aspect of the WHO, lavishing praise on its officers for their “timely warnings” and the “good works” they do across the planet.
So what is the truth about the WHO?
The WHO, an agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health, was officially founded on April 7, 1948, a day that is now commemorated as World Health Day worldwide. With a budget just over $4 billion and field offices around the world, the WHO’s stated mission is primarily concerned with monitoring and alleviating major public health risks and coordinating an international response to health crises, as well as promoting sustainable development.
Tedros became director-general of the WHO in 2017. Prior to that, he worked with a variety of international health organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and PEPFAR, the U.S.-sponsored AIDS program, to reform and liberalize the Ethiopian healthcare system while serving as Ethiopia’s minister of health and later minister of foreign affairs.
In addition to his ties to the global public health industry, Tedros has long-standing connections to China as well, working directly with senior Chinese officials to bring development and funding to Ethiopia while serving as foreign minister.
It is Tedros’s ties to China and seeming deferment to the Chinese Communist Party that has brought harsh criticism to him and the WHO more generally, particularly in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. In late January, Tedros praised China for “the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak, despite the severe social and economic impact those measures are having on the Chinese people.”
“The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome, and shared it with WHO and the world are very impressive, and beyond words,” Tedros went on to say. “So is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries.”
He also noted that China “is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response,” and affirmed the WHO’s confidence in China’s ability to “control the outbreak.” President Trump, a leading critic of both Tedros and the WHO, has lambasted the Chinese response to the virus and has accused WHO of mismanaging the crisis, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in the United States and around the world.
Last month, President Trump announced the U.S.—the leading donor to the WHO—would temporarily halt funding to the global health organization due to the agency’s bungled response and seeming bias in favor of China. Early last week, President Trump sent a letter to the WHO threatening to totally sever ties with the organization and drop all funding on a permanent basis.
Accusing the WHO’s leadership of “political gamesmanship,” President Trump insisted that the WHO “ignored credible reports of the virus” and failed to take action. The president also accused the Chinese government of attempting to cover up the spread of the virus. He also lambasted China’s and the WHO’s early assessment that the virus could not be transmitted human-to-human, as well as the WHO’s approval of China restricting travel while criticizing President Trump’s moves to limit international travel into the United States. WHO officials also send wildly contradictory messages about the effectiveness of wearing face masks.
“It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world,” President Trump concluded in his letter. “I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests.”
The WHO has pledged to launch an inquiry into the global response to the pandemic, including its own actions. It has also recently published a manifesto for a “healthy recovery” from the pandemic, which urges world leaders to confront “the existential threat of climate change” and embark upon sustainable development.
No doubt forced vaccinations, social distancing, mandatory quarantines will be part of the equation as will be an insistence that only technocrats like those at WHO are qualified to make decisions about your health and our proper interactions with the environment.
John Friend is a freelance writer based in California.
