by Con Coughlin, GATESTONE INSTITUTE • April 10, 2020 at 5:00 am
- Rather than criticising Beijing for its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak, Dr Tedros instead praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his “very rare leadership”, and China for showing “transparency” in its response to the virus.
- “The W.H.O. really blew it… Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?” — US President Donald J. Trump, Twitter, April 7, 2020.
- Why indeed?
The blatant pro-China bias shown by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its response to the coronavirus pandemic has raised a number of serious questions about its handling of the crisis. Pictured: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pays a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on January 28, 2020. (Photo by Naohiko Hatta/AFP via Getty Images)
As the body responsible for maintaining global health standards, the UN-sponsored World Health Organization (WHO) is supposed to adopt an even-handed approach when dealing with all member states, irrespective of how powerful they might be.
It is for this reason that the blatant pro-China bias the organisation has shown in its response to the coronavirus pandemic has raised a number of serious questions about the WHO’s handling of the crisis.
Under the terms of the WHO’s constitution, which sets out the agency’s governing structure and principles, the Geneva-based organisation is charged with ensuring “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.”
The accusation made by the Trump Administration, that the global body has become “China centric” and has been “biased” in its dealings with Beijing over the pandemic, therefore suggest the organisation has failed in its duty to treat all member states equally.
“The WHO’s response to COVID-19 reveals its political bias – opinion
The WHO’s recent actions further exposes their obvious political bias, destroys any credibility they had and gives little reason for anyone to ever believe what they claim in the future.
By MATTHEW WEARP APRIL 20, 2020 16:21 Email Twitter Facebook fb-messenger
Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks during a news conference on the situation of the coronavirus (COVID-2019), in Geneva, Switzerland, February 28, 2020. (photo credit: REUTERS/DENIS BALIBOUSE)
Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks during a news conference on the situation of the coronavirus (COVID-2019), in Geneva, Switzerland, February 28, 2020.
(photo credit: REUTERS/DENIS BALIBOUSE)
The World Health Organization (WHO) was created by the United Nations as the directing authority for international health matters and public health. According to the WHO, their mission is to keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable, allow all peoples to attain the highest possible level of health, and promote human rights for all.
Yet the WHO’s recent actions further exposes their obvious political bias, destroys any credibility they had left, permanently discredits them, and gives little reason for anyone to ever believe what they claim in the future.”
From today’s (April 20) Jerusalem Post. The author points out that WHO, a UN agency, refuses to admit Taiwan to the organization, and refuses to transmit or accept information from Taiwan about SARS-CoVid-2 and COVID-19, even though Taiwan has a lot of useful, relevant information on this subject. It classifies Israel as a “European” country, but the “Palestinian Occupied Territories” [sic] as a “”Middle Eastern” country. It has adopted a resolution condemning Israel for alleged responsibility for “poor health conditions” in the “oppupied Palestinian territories.” It hasn’t adopted a resolution condemning any other country for “poor health conditions” or anything else. Such a politicized agency, more concerned with advancing the political agendas of China and the Muslim states than with people’s health, should be defunded.
“In December 2019, a cluster of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause was linked to a seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, China. A previously unknown betacoronavirus was discovered through the use of unbiased sequencing in samples from patients with pneumonia. Human airway epithelial cells were used to isolate a novel coronavirus, named 2019-nCoV, which formed a clade within the subgenus sarbecovirus, Orthocoronavirinae subfamily. Different from both MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV, 2019-nCoV is the seventh member of the family of coronaviruses that infect humans. Enhanced surveillance and further investigation are ongoing. (Funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Major Project for Control and Prevention of Infectious Disease in China.)
Emerging and reemerging pathogens are global challenges for public health.1 Coronaviruses are enveloped RNA viruses that are distributed broadly among humans, other mammals, and birds and that cause respiratory, enteric, hepatic, and neurologic diseases.2,3 Six coronavirus species are known to cause human disease.4 Four viruses — 229E, OC43, NL63, and HKU1 — are prevalent and typically cause common cold symptoms in immunocompetent individuals.4 The two other strains — severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) — are zoonotic in origin and have been linked to sometimes fatal illness.5 SARS-CoV was the causal agent of the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreaks in 2002 and 2003 in Guangdong Province, China.6-8 MERS-CoV was the pathogen responsible for severe respiratory disease outbreaks in 2012 in the Middle East.9 Given the high prevalence and wide distribution of coronaviruses, the large genetic diversity and frequent recombination of their genomes, and increasing human–animal interface activities, novel coronaviruses are likely to emerge periodically in humans owing to frequent cross-species infections and occasional spillover events.5,10
In late December 2019, several local health facilities reported clusters of patients with pneumonia of unknown cause that were epidemiologically linked to a seafood and wet animal wholesale market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.11 On December 31, 2019, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) dispatched a rapid response team to accompany Hubei provincial and Wuhan city health authorities and to conduct an epidemiologic and etiologic investigation. We report the results of this investigation, identifying the source of the pneumonia clusters, and describe a novel coronavirus detected in patients with pneumonia whose specimens were tested by the China CDC at an early stage of the outbreak. We also describe clinical features of the pneumonia in two of these patients.”
This quotation is from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year by the Chinese “Novel Coronavirus Investigative Team.” About 20 M.D.s and Ph. Ds, all Chinese, are listed as co-authors of the study.
It is interesting that these Chinese “experts” reported that all of the patients in whom they detected the novel Coronavirus were suffering from “pneumonia.” Did they then die of “novel coronavirus” or “pneumonia?”
Now we hear of patients who tested positive for coronavirus, and became critically ill, but did not have pneumonia. I wonder if they were tested for any other illness beside “COVID-19,” such as influenza or steptococcus infections. Since either these patients were not tested for anything but “coronavirus,” or if they were , John Hopkins University hasn’t bothered to tell us, we may never no whether “coronavirus” made them sick, or something else.