By Duncan Smith
We’ve known for some time that the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (pictured) was a dupe of the Chinese government and was helping Beijing hide the worst effects of the coronavirus even as the outbreak became a pandemic.
What was less known was whether other ranking officials at WHO were equally complicit in the cover-up.
Now we discover the answer: No.
According to The Associated Press, several officials within the organization secretly opposed WHO’s downplaying of coronavirus and especially Tedro’s refusal to put more pressure on the ChiComs to come clean while at the same time praising Beijing’s pathetic response.
Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus ‘immediately,’ and said its work and commitment to transparency were ‘very impressive, and beyond words.’
But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found. Despite the plaudits, China in fact sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. Tight controls on information and competition within the Chinese public health system were to blame, according to dozens of interviews and internal documents.
Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11.
Even then, China stalled for at least two weeks more on providing WHO with detailed data on patients and cases, according to recordings of internal meetings held by the U.N. health agency through January — all at a time when the outbreak arguably might have been dramatically slowed.
In short, China lied to the world about COVID-19 and the WHO’s ranking leaders including Tedros helped facilitate the lie. In fact, the Chinese are continuing to withhold information and suppress data, Red State notes further.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has cut off WHO’s funding and redirected the $440-odd million to other international health efforts because it’s obvious that Tedros is more beholden to Bejing, which contributes one-tenth as much.
