Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told Fox News on Tuesday that the World Health Organization is “too compromised” due to its willingness to join communist China in dismissing the Wuhan lab-leak theory.
“Clearly, they were incapable of compelling China to adhere to the treaty agreements that they have on global health because they didn’t do that. Clearly, they allowed China to define the group of scientists that could come and investigate,” said Redfield, who served under the Trump administration for nearly three years. “That’s not consistent with their role.”
Others have faulted the WHO for not only communicating blatantly wrong information about COVID-19 to the public but also quickly appealing to China, which lied about the pandemic, and dismissing any theories that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where gain-of-function research had occurred, even after reports found that several researchers fell ill with COVID-like symptoms.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
Despite the WHO’s shaky pandemic track record, the White House announced at the end of May that the World Health Organization would continue to head up investigations into the origins of COVID-19.
“What role does the Biden administration think U.S. scientists or CDC scientists should play in that investigation?” a reporter asked.
“The WHO would be the body that would be overseeing a transparent, independent phase two investigation. That’s something we have strongly supported,” Psaki said. “That would require China finally stepping up and allowing access needed to determine the origins.”
Other members of the Biden administration including Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed China will allow a transparent Wuhan lab probe because it’s “profoundly” in their “interest.”
“Will you demand that? Will you put teeth on it? Will you even go as far as sanctions on China if they keep inspectors out?” Axios co-founder Mike Allen asked Blinken in an interview earlier this month.
Blinken agreed that the world requires transparency about the creation and spread of the deadly virus but refused to give a direct answer when Allen pressed him for a more substantive plan for action.
“At the end of the day, it is profoundly in China’s interest to do this as well because it’s suffered too in the outbreak of this pandemic,” Blinken said. “It presumably has an interest as well.”
Source: The Federalist
