It’s been clear from the pandemic’s start that China staged a shameful coverup that cost lives across the world. Now, newly uncovered details show that the World Health Organization didn’t just kowtow to the Communists — the UN agency actively helped Beijing whitewash its deadly deeds.
The New York Times summed up its blockbuster report, which covered internal documents and interviews with more than 50 officials and scientists, this way: “As it praised Beijing, the World Health Organization concealed concessions to China and may have sacrificed the best chance to unravel the virus’s origins.”
In other words, WHO did China’s bidding, at the cost of more than a million lives.
Back in February, WHO’s emergency director, Michael Ryan, said it was critical to understand the virus’s source. But the agency ignored the advice of its emergency committee in dealing with China, and “negotiated terms that sidelined its own experts,” the Times reports. “They would not question China’s initial response or even visit the live-animal market in the city of Wuhan where the outbreak seemed to have originated.”
Indeed, nearly a year “and more than 1.1 million deaths later, there is still no transparent, independent investigation into the source of the virus.”
Heck, when Australia called for such an investigation back in April, Beijing barred Aussie imports into the country — and still does.
But WHO has been heaping praise on China all year and claimed it was investigating the virus’ origins — despite knowing the Communists made any real investigation impossible. WHO leaders, the Times says, “have largely ceded control” of the “investigation” to China but the agency “has refused to disclose details of its negotiations with Beijing.”
“It was an absolute whitewash,” Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times.
The Times report follows one the June probe by the Associated Press that found WHO officials privately complained in January that “China was not sharing enough data to assess how effectively the virus spread between people or what risk it posed to the rest of the world, costing valuable time.”
WHO praised China throughout January, thanking the country for sharing the virus’ genetic map “immediately” and saying its work and transparency were “very impressive and beyond words.”
In reality, “Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website,” the AP reported — more than a week after it had the genetic map. “The delay in the release of the genome stalled the recognition of its spread to other countries, along with the global development of tests, drugs and vaccines,” the AP noted.
AP investigators uncovered an internal notice in which Chinese officials in early January found the coronavirus was “contagious through respiratory passages.” But WHO was saying that same day that information from China indicated “no evidence of significant transmission between humans.”
As January ended, WHO’s director general utterrf unalloyed praise for the regime that had cost the world crucial time. “We should have actually expressed our respect and gratitude to China for what it’s doing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “It has already done incredible things to limit the transmission of the virus to other countries.”
As Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, told the AP, “It’s obvious that we could have saved more lives and avoided many, many deaths if China and the WHO had acted faster.”
Even now, nearly a year later, WHO continues its coverup. Withdrawing funding from this corrupt organization that has the blood of a million COVID deaths on its hands was one of the wisest parts of President Trump’s coronavirus response.