There’s been a lot of social media umbrage at how the World Health Organization conveniently skipped the Greek letter Xi in naming the latest Covid variant, presumably to avoid embarrassing China’s Dear Leader. In truth, WHO skipping letters in their own naming convention (designed in the first place to eliminate references to Wuhan) is merely ridiculous, not dangerous. What’s dangerous is WHO leadership placing Chinese political interests ahead of global health interests, something Tedros and team have done from the start of the Covid pandemic. The World Health Organization is not just a disgrace. It is not just a humiliation for the thousands of researchers and clinicians doing good work under their auspices.
It is a betrayal of the entire world.
By Ben Hunt for Epsilon Theory
Where possible, China wants to criminalize speech that doesn’t follow the official party line. If that speech can’t be criminalized, China wants to ban it through the cooperative censorship of global tech and media platforms. If that speech can’t be banned, China wants us to reject it as “fake news”.
Dr. Tedros, a man who covered up cholera epidemics in Ethiopia and appointed Robert freakin’ Mugabe as a Goodwill Ambassador, is China’s foremost stooge in this narrative control campaign. He is a mole in the Great Pandemic Narrative War, hand-picked by China for precisely this purpose, and the rest of the world has paid a heavy price for his unwavering support of Beijing’s political interests.
On Feb. 4, 2020, after a private meeting with Xi, Tedros formally announced to the WHO Executive Board that there was no need to “interfere with international travel and trade” in or out of China and, more specifically, that restricting Chinese flights was “counter-productive” to fighting the global spread of the virus.
This was a lie in service to Chinese political interests, and Tedros (and the entire WHO Executive Board) knew it. They knew it was a lie because a week earlier, WHO-sponsored doctors in Hong Kong published independent studies showing it was a lie, that the only way to contain the international spread of a virus this infectious was to shut down travel.
In the following crucial weeks, Tedros focused WHO resources on narrative containment, not virus containment.
In addition to a personal media campaign of speeches and op-eds against the evils of “misinformation and rumours”, Tedros negotiated with Twitter, Facebook, Tencent and TikTok for platform-imposed limits on Covid-related posts. Most critically, Tedros reached an agreement with Google to alter its search algorithm so that WHO-sponsored sites would appear at the top of Covid-related searches.
Two “false conspiracy theories” were the primary targets of WHO efforts at narrative control – a Wuhan lab origin and “exaggerations about the number of sick and dead” in China.
Not coincidentally, these were the primary targets of Beijing’s efforts at narrative control, too.
The WHO narrative control effort on behalf of the Chinese government continued in 2021 with the “fact-finding mission” to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the Covid virus.
The crack team assembled by WHO literally spent more time “visiting a museum celebrating China’s success in controlling the virus in Wuhan and a frozen food storage facility at a local wholesale market” than at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They determined that it is “highly unlikely” that the Covid virus originated at the local Level-4 biolab doing gain-of-function research on these very same coronaviruses. So unlikely, in fact, that the lab-escape hypothesis would no longer be a subject for any future WHO investigation on this topic.
It was entirely possible, though, that the virus was brought into Wuhan via frozen American pork, Russian squid, or Saudi shrimp. This potential “transmission through the trade of frozen cold-chain products”, not coincidentally China’s favored explanation for the Wuhan outbreak, clearly deserved extensive WHO investigation in the future.
The World Health Organization is not just a disgrace. It is not just a humiliation for the thousands of researchers and clinicians doing good work under their auspices.
It is a betrayal of the entire world.
Fortunately, WHO is an umbrella funding organization, not a scientific research organization in its own right. Donors provide both assessed contributions (nations in proportion to their UN funding assessments) and voluntary contributions (nations and charitable organizations in whatever amounts they wish), and WHO doles out the funds to worthy applicants under various program headings.
Interestingly, the top three donors to WHO in the 2018-2019 budget cycle – the US government ($893 million), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($531 million) and the UK government ($435 million) – gave 24 times more money to WHO than China (~$78 million).
There is zero reason why the donor funds that WHO currently channels to scientists and research programs cannot be allocated directly.
This is exactly what the US, the Gates Foundation, the UK, the Gavi Alliance (a vehicle for additional US, Gates Foundation and UK/European funding), Germany and Japan should do — allocate directly to the researchers and clinicians who further global health interests, not Beijing’s political interests.
Defund the World Health Organization.
Defund the narrative.
