In a scathing letter written to Dr. Tedros, Director of World Health Organisation (WHO), US President Donald Trump has accused it of working for the interests of China rather than the world which has now caused the pandemic resulting in millions of deaths. His letter states that WHO is dependent on China and hence ignored early warnings and reports of the spread of Virus. The WHO also failed to alert the world or even take action on the communication by Taiwan on human-to-human transmission of the virus.
Trump than targets China saying that the communist country failed to inform WHO of several cases in pneumonia from unknown origins in Wuhan as per International Health Regulations which require countries to report risk of a health emergency within 24 hours. He also accuses China of targeting doctors and whistle-blowers who spoke about the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan and China’s failure to contain it.
Trump then directly charges WHO of failing repeatedly in controlling the outbreak. The instances he states are:
– WHO endorsing China’s claim on January 14th that Coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans
– Not declaring Coronavirus outbreak an emergency under the pressure from Chinese President Xi Jinping
– WHO instead of questioning China about silencing doctors for speaking out about the virus, praised China for its ‘transparency’
WHO further failed to press China for the timely admittance of a international team of experts to research about the virus. WHO was also silent when China denied 2 American members of the team access to Wuhan when other were finally allowed, says the letter.
Charging Dr. Tedros of political gamesmanship, Trump says that he had praised China for domestic travel restrictions but was against US closing its borders for people coming in from China. WHO failed to stop China when it knowingly allowed 5 million of its citizens to leave Wuhan and travel all over the world. By the time WHO declared Coronavirus a Pandemic on March 11, 2020, it had already killed more than 4,000 people and had affected more than 100,000 people in 114 countries, he writes.
WHO also failed to haul up China for its racial treatment of African citizens in that country. Despite all these faults, WHO has been curiously insistent on praising China, says Trump. The WHO failed to publicly call on China to allow for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus but this was effected only after the insistence of countries at the World Health Assembly. This showcases the failure of WHO under Dr. Tedros writes Trump.
The WHO has much more potential as displayed on earlier occasion like the handling of SARS outbreak by the then WHO Director General Harlem Brundtland who also did not hesitate to criticise China for endangering global heath by covering up the outbreak.
“It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organisation in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world”, writes Trump at the end. The only way forward to the WHO is it can actually demonstrate independence from China and take substantive meaasures to improve the organisation in the next 30 days. Failing which the US permanently freeze its funding to WHO and also reconsider its membership to the organisation, he says. Trump’s letter ends with saying that he cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue finance an organisation that is so clearly not serving America’s interests.
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