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March 3, 2021 (Population Research Institute) – The Biden administration just sent $200 million to the World Health Organization, reversing the May 2020 decision of the Trump administration to cut ties with the failed organization for its “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.”
Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, justified the cash bailout as a way of “ensuring that WHO has the support it needs to lead the response to the pandemic, even as we work to reform it in the future.”
In my view, giving money to WHO for the pandemic is like giving more gasoline to the arsonist who set the fire in the first place.
Has anything happened over the past 10 months to justify rejoining and resuming funding to the WHO? Has the organization apologized for what Trump correctly called its “repeated missteps” in dealing with the China Virus? Has it acknowledged that it was dead wrong in opposing travel bans on flights from China, or in blithely repeating Beijing’s false claim that the Wuhan epidemic was under control? Has it in any way criticized the Communist regime for its mishandling of the epidemic?
The answer to all these questions is an emphatic no. If anything, the WHO has burrowed deeper into bed with Beijing in recent months in an attempt to hide the origin and spread of the China Virus.
Much has been written about WHO’s highly publicized visit to Wuhan last month, but did you know that a WHO team had secretly met with Chinese officials last summer? According to a since-leaked internal document, the 10-member team found Chinese officials unhelpful and unwilling to investigate the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus.
WHO’s team reported at the time, “Following extensive discussions with and presentations from Chinese counterparts, it appears that little had been done in terms of epidemiological investigations around Wuhan since January 2020. The data presented orally gave few more details than what was presented at the emergency committee meetings in January 2020. No PowerPoint presentations were made and no documents were shared.”
The critical tone of this internal document was not, however, reflected in WHO’s public statements. These have invariably described the Chinese government as cooperative and actively engaged in ongoing investigations in China.
Neither of these claims is true.
The lack of cooperation has continued to the present day. When WHO delegation was finally allowed to visit Wuhan in January, Chinese officials quarantined its members for two whole weeks. During their remaining 10 days in country, they were carefully chaperoned. Not only were they allowed only one short visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they were also denied access to its research records or interviews with its researchers or staff. The Chinese side presented some “analyses” to the WHO investigators that claimed the coronavirus had originated in nature, but refused to hand over the valuable raw data and samples that could be used to verify this.
Some members of the delegation complained about this, stating that without access to the raw data there was simply no way to judge the accuracy of the Chinese claims, but WHO as a whole pronounced itself satisfied.
This has prompted a number of well-known scientists to issue strong criticisms of the WHO investigation, one calling it nothing more than a “charade” to cover up Chinese responsibility for the China Virus. I second this opinion, having long believed that China manufactured the China Virus in its Wuhan lab.
China is covering up its complicity by withholding the raw data that could be used to trace it back to the lab, and preventing outside investigators from interviewing the researchers responsible.
Instead, it claims that the disease actually arose in the United States or Europe and that it was brought to Wuhan in shipments of frozen food.
This bizarre theory — for which there is zero real-world evidence — actually found its way into the WHO report. Some might call this incompetence, but I rather think it shows complicity in China’s cover-up.
If you want evidence that the WHO was taking its pandemic marching orders from Beijing, look no further than the cold shoulder it gave to Taiwan. The island nation sent multiple warnings to the WHO about the plague brewing on the mainland, and early on closed its borders to traffic from Wuhan, and yet it was ignored.
“In December, the WHO refused to act on or publicize Taiwan’s warning that the new respiratory infection emerging in China could pass from human to human,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, later wrote. “In mid January, despite accumulating evidence of patients contracting what we now know as COVID-19 from other people, the organization repeated the (Chinese Communist Party’s) lie that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. In January, the WHO, at Beijing’s behest, also blocked Taiwan from participating in critical meetings to coordinate responses to the coronavirus and even reportedly provided wrong information about the virus’s spread in Taiwan.”
The Biden administration admits that it has “deep concerns” about the World Health Organization’s investigation into the pandemic, particularly Beijing’s interference with the investigation into its origins, but it has nevertheless turned the funding spigot back on again.
The hapless bureaucrats, who ignored early warnings from Taiwan, helped China cover up the severity of the pandemic, and just carried out a pretend investigation into the origins of the pandemic that was stage-managed by the Chinese Communist Party, will now have $200 million more to play with.
In this and so many other areas, the Biden administration is returning to the failed policies of the past.
Is anyone surprised?
Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.
