Trump is Right about the World Health Organization, Everything They Got Wrong about COVID-19

By US Politics and News Last updated Apr 9, 2020

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is an Ethiopian microbiologist and is the Director General of the World Health Organization. He is also a Chinese dupe, who needs to look for another job.

In fact, President Trump, who has endured scurrilous criticism from Democrats and the mainstream media over his initial reaction to the coronavirus threat in January (when he banned flights coming in from Wuhan), may have taken his lead from W.H.O.’s initially (and tragically) bad calls.

The President has labeled W.H.O. as “very China-centric.” W.H.O., he said, “criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it, and they were wrong.” Also, W.H.O. never promptly reported the outbreak when it took hold in China: “They missed the call. They could’ve called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known and they probably did know.”

Another doctor, Li Wenliang, had warned his Chinese colleagues about the outbreak of coronavirus. Dr. Li’s reward was a scary summons to the ChiCom Public Security Bureau in Wuhan to face accusations that he had made false statements and “disrupted public order.” Other arrests followed, but by mid-January cowed Chinese doctors were fully aware that COVID-19 had jumped from its bat-soup confines to humans, they just weren’t allowed to tell Europe or the U.S. that fact.

On January 14, W.H.O. announced that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the virus.

Two weeks later, the W.H.O. Director traveled to Beijing and met with China’s president Xi Jinping. In an astonishing example of bad judgement the W.H.O. director was actually impressed by China’s response. Chinese authorities, he gushed, should be commended for “setting a new standard for outbreak control.” Then he followed up with a colossally naïve statement by praising the Chinese for their “openness for sharing information.”

Dr. Li, on the other hand, probably disagreed. He died after contracting coronavirus.

The W.H.O. emergency committee–even after international medical authorities had discredited the Chinese health data—on January 23 debated on whether to declare COVID-19 a public-health emergency.

Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the W.H.O. Director argued that the Chinese data was good. Over the objections of other committee members, W.H.O. delayed.

That decision further delayed mobilizing public-health resources around the world. One committee member cited lousy reporting and even worse communication from the ChiComs as the source of W.H.O.’s bad decision.

Nevertheless, the W.H.O. Director ignored the egg-foo-young on his face and doubled down. After finally declaring an emergency on January 30, he sent his pal Xi even more kudos: On February 20, he shamelessly reported that Chinese actions were “slowing the spread to the rest of the world.”

OK, so pay attention you non-microbiologists everywhere: Doesn’t “slowing the spread” of a disease mean confining an infection to where it is? When President Trump had already limited travel from China to the U.S. on January 31, the W.H.O. Director’s amazing comment was that the President’s travel ban would “have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”

So, this is what a $400 million U.S. contribution to W.H.O. gets us. (By the way, according to Reuters, that is roughly eight times what China contributed in 2019.) W.H.O. officials are likely sweating bullets as President Trump and other U.S. leaders are planning to strike that contribution from future budgets.

This one is so bad that even the Democrats can’t find a way to paper over this latest United Nations debacle.