‘Not cholera but acute diarrhoea,’ WHO chief has a history of covering up epidemics & sucking up to China

As the world becomes aware of the Chinese government’s lethargy and incompetence which has plunged the world into an unprecedented crisis, the WHO’s role in helping spread the Wuhan virus is also becoming clearer by the day. The WHO must be worried as after #chinaliedpeopledied trended on Twitter, its the turn of #wholiedpeopledied as more murky details of Dr Tredos led WHO’s collusion with the Chinese government comes out in open.

It all started with the World Health Organisation’s initial denial of the possibility of human to human transmission of the Wuhan virus despite the desperate claims of Chinese whistleblowers like Dr Wenliang and Taiwan.

But the WHO ignored the warning perhaps because China claims Taiwan to be a part of its territory while in reality, the Chinese Communist Party rules only the Mainland China. Paying heed to Taiwan’s warnings would have meant the WHO recognising the global status of Taiwan something which Xi Jinping wouldn’t have liked. Hence, the desperate warnings of Taiwan and Dr Wenliang were paid no heed by the WHO.

To put things into perspective, Taiwan was the first country to act against the threat of the Wuhan virus as around 60,000 flights carrying 10 million passengers travel between Taiwan and China every year. However, the WHO decided to play Beijing’s political games as it excluded the country from the emergency meetings of the WHO on how to tackle the Wuhan virus.

Since 2016, Taiwan hasn’t been allowed to participate at the annual World Health Assembly and WHO technical and experts’ meetings — which is a sign of the sway that China has over the WHO.

Much to the glee of Xi Jinping, the WHO continues to address Taiwan as “Chinese Taipei” and all the cases of the Wuhan virus released by the Taiwanese authorities are shockingly placed under China despite the fact that the Xi Jinping government has no jurisdiction over Taiwan.

It is important to note that, Taiwan has been ranked as no.1 for two consecutive years in the Health Care Index and the nation’s participation in the WHO meetings would have certainly helped the world.

What’s more appalling is the fact that on February 28, the WHO listed Taiwan as “very high risk” at a time when the country had only 34 confirmed cases of the Wuhan virus. This had a devastating impact on Taiwan as countries like Italy, Philippines and Vietnam restricted the flights to and fro from Taiwan and also the entry of Taiwanese nationals.

Ironically, when China was recording thousands of new cases of the Wuhan virus every day, the WHO castigated countries like the USA and India for deciding to restrict travel to and fro from China. Shockingly, the WHO further claimed that there was no need of any screening as it offers little benefit and required deployment of considerable resources.

At the same time, China was under the scanner for lack of transparency as from underreporting the numbers to the mysterious disappearance of citizen journalists who dared to expose the callousness of the Chinese government, Xi Jinping did it all. Hence, to tackle the claim of transparency, the WHO earlier this month came out with a 40-page report on how well the Chinese government has tackled the Wuhan virus. 

While the Communist government has imposed a two-month lockdown on Wuhan, the WHO report meekly mentions the lockdown as “strict traffic restrictions” and “the cordon sanitaire”. The report lauds China’s epidemic response measures — but conveniently ignores the late-December / early-January dates that might implicate the party’s initial mismanagement of the crisis.

If there were any doubts on the neutrality of the report, a line in the report reads that: “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.”

However, the WHO wouldn’t have been able to vociferously defend the Chinese government without its director-general Dr Tedros. In 2017, everyone was surprised when Dr Tedros who is not a medical doctor and lacking any global health management experience occupied the prestigious position.

Back in 2017, there were red flags raised over the nomination of Dr Tedros as he is accused of covering up deadly epidemics. Dr Tedros was earlier the Health Minister of Ethiopia from 2005 to 2012 and later served as the country’s Foreign Minister from 2012-2016.

Under his tenure, the Dr Tedros made a name for himself by covering up the cholera epidemics of 2006, 2009, and 2011. Despite the death toll and the fatality of the virus, the Ethiopian government only labelled them as ‘outbreaks’.

At the time of his nomination, the country was suffering from yet another cholera epidemic but the Ethiopian government pushed to label the Cholera epidemic as an acute ‘diarrhoea’, despite the fact that neighbouring countries like Kenya, South Sudan and Somalia had labelled it as a cholera outbreak. According to various Human rights organizations, the Ethiopian government back then pressured the health professionals to not refer to the current outbreak as cholera, but as diarrhoea.

Under the tenure of Dr Tedros, for the first time ever, decided to endorse China’s belief system called “traditional Chinese medicine” which is further proof of how Dr Tedros was directly in bed with Xi Jinping. 

When Xi Jinping ordered his health officials to develop drugs using “integrated Chinese traditional herbal medicine and Western medicine,” the WHO’s “Q&A on COVID19” immediately changed a vital piece of information in the section which pointed out the list of measures deemed ineffective against the coronavirus.

Before Xi Jinping’s support for traditional herbal medicine, the WHO listed four items which were deemed ineffective against the Wuhan virus which were namely, smoking, wearing multiple masks, taking antibiotics, and traditional herbal remedies. The publication has now removed the mention of traditional herbal remedies from the list.

China’s ‘traditional herbal medicine’ effectively means trafficking and killing of exotic wildlife, from Tigers to Rhinos, to make medicines which have no clinical proof. China’s drug regulator gets more than 230,000 reports of adverse effects from TCM each year.

China’s traditional medicine has a major role to play in the dwindling population of the African Rhino. The horns of the few remaining Rhinos are chopped off to be sold to become part of elixirs that some people in China mistakenly believe that it would confer strength, virility, or other health benefits.

An example of barbarity of China’s traditional medicine was highlighted when the New York Times reported how black bears were kept in horrible and cruel “animal farms” with a tube always inserted into their abdomen so as to harvest their bile. It also believes in consuming the bones of tigers so as to gain virility.

It is appalling to see how the WHO can endorse such barbaric practices. The WHO’s support will further aid China’s booming wet market industry which has overseen two of the most devastating viruses since the turn of the century – SARS and the Wuhan virus.

Viruses as deadly as the Wuhan virus usually have a very narrow host range in terms of the species they can infect, and therefore this cross-over was possible only in a place like the Wuhan wet market, which is one of the rare places were bats, pangolins and humans are found at one place, thus resulting in the outbreak of the virus. Pangolins from an endangered species, illegally traded, and faces the risk of being eaten to extinction.

The menu of Wuhan’s wet market includes the likes of tiger, camel, snakes, rabbits, bats, bears, foxes and many more varieties of exotic wildlife. The wet markets of China were emboldened by the Communist Party’s decision in 1998 to term wildlife as “resources owned by the state” and protected people engaged in the “utilization of wildlife resources”.

The WHO’s backing would effectively act as a shot in the arm for China’s rampant animal trade.

Of course, Dr Tedros is not becoming a willing accomplice only because of his love for Xi Jinping or communism. China has invested (another example of debt-trap diplomacy) heavily in Ethiopia thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative and has emerged as China’s point of contact in Africa deservingly getting the tag of East Africa’s “Little China”.

By 2016-2018, Chinese direct investment (FDI) in Ethiopia had reached US $4 billion and bilateral trade had grown to $5.4 billion. A McKinsley report in 2017 showed how the Chinese investment has continued to grow at an average growth rate of more than 52% a year in Ethiopia.

Dr Tedros is also an executive member of an Ethiopian party which is listed as a perpetrator in the Global Terrorism Database. Hence, it comes as no surprise that Tedros attempted to appoint the barbarian and the then-dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe as WHO’s goodwill ambassador.

When the world finally wins the battle against the Wuhan virus, Dr Tedros must be tried as a war criminal and the organisations like the WHO must be restructured because in their present form they literally serve no purpose except serving their Chinese masters.