President Donald Trump raised the very real possibility that the World Health Organization [WHO] is responsible for the coronavirus AKA CoV-2 or Covid-19 global pandemic. WHO Director General 55-year-old Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused to investigate a spiraling viral epidemic causing pneumonia and death in Wuhan, China. Tedros refused to send WHO investigators to Wuhan until Feb. 8, one week after Trump banned all Chinese flights to the United States. Tedros implied that Trump overreacted, exposing his xenophobic tendencies. “There is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” Tedros said Feb. 8 in Geneva, repeating a Chinese Communist Party talking point about Trump’s decision. By the time Tedros spoke up there were already 9,000 SARS CoV-2 cases worldwide, with the first cases washing up on U.S. soil in Seattle, Washington Jan. 21.
Tedros did everything possible to cover up China’s spiraling epidemic in December 2019, saying nothing when millions of infected Chinese tourists traveled to the U.S., Europe and parts beyond. WHO receives about $86 million of its 4.42 billion annual budget from China, while the United States gives $116 million in general funding and another $400 million for special projects. Tedros knew about the Wuhan conronavirus outbreak in December 2019 but waited until March 11 to declare the Wuhan SARS CoV-2 epidemic a global pandemic. Commissioned by the United Nation’s as the global health agency, WHO’s primary mission is to stop local epidemics from spreading to global pandemics. WHO touts its work on such epidemics as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1 Swine Flu, SARS, MERS, etc, but somehow dropped the ball on SARS CoV-2 epidemic.
Tedros remarks Feb. 8 in Geneva tell the whole story about his inappropriate relationship protecting not U.N. members-states and world citizens from a deadly viral plague but China’s bottom line, something Tedros refers to as “travel and trade.” Tedros had an inside track to get his job at WHO July 1, 2017 because Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wife Peng Liyuan worked for years as WHO’s global ambassador. Tedros took over from Hong Kong, Canadian-trained physician Margaret Chan. With Tedros, Xi knew he had someone controlled by Chinese largesse in Ethiopia, he could never say no to China. Reacting to Trump’s Jan. 31 China travel ban, Tedros gave away his inappropriate attachment to China’s Communist Party. Trump’s 62-year-old State Department immunologist Dr. Deborah Birx admitted that WHO “did delay the ability” to declare coronavirus a global pandemic.
Trump’s concerns about WHO’s leadership was immediately attacked by the anti-Trump press. When you consider that the coronavirus outbreak occurred in Wuhan, China, most likely leaked from China’s National Virology Laboratory, where it’s bioweapons lab experiments with deadly viruses on laboratory animals, it’s shocking that WHO wouldn’t have taken more timely action. “The WHO can only react to the data it’s given, and when you go back and look at the timeline, it wasn’t until, I think, almost the middle of January that China reported that there was human-to-human transmission,” Birx said. But, unlike Trump, Birx doesn’t read between the lines, knowing that one week after Trump banned flights to-and-from China, Tedros made his public remarks about protecting China’s “travel and trade.” It’s clear Tedros had Xi’s back, not U.N. member-states.
Under fire now for his lethargic response to the coronavirus crisis, Tedros went into full-on damage control. “Please don’t politicize this virus,” Tedros said today in Geneva. “The focus of all political parties should be to save their people,” Tedros said, shifting blame away from his inappropriate relationship with China and failed response to prevent the Wuhan epidemic from spreading around the globe. When you consider that over 200 countries suffer from the global SARS CoV-2 pandemic affecting 1,501,685 cases with 87,838 deaths, Tedros should be apologizing profusely for WHO’s sluggish response. Waiting nearly five weeks after his Feb. 8 Geneva remarks about protecting China “travel and trade” until declaring a global Pandemic March 11 is inexcusable. Tedros’s latest damage control tries to put him as a political scapegoat, not a corrupt, incompetent bureaucrat.
Showing guilt over his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, Tedros cares now about saving his own hide that admitting how WHO failed under his leadership to do his job to confront a spiraling viral outbreak in Wuhan. Instead of notifying U.N. member-states about the dangers, Tedros obeyed Xi, delaying any announcement until March 11, by that time the world was set ablaze with the most deadly pandemic since the 1981 H1N1 Spanish Flu epidemic that infected 500 million and killed up to 100 million world citizens. Instead of shifting blame to politics, Tedros must resign his post immediately for failing to do his job. WHO’s current funding mechanism, giving undo weight to China, puts the world at risk for another global crisis. Tedros must step aside for protecting Chinas’ bottom line, not protecting U.N. member-states from current and future infectious disease.
