Visit Counter

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Gordon G. Chang: Trump right to attack WHO on coronavirus – UN agency deserves even harsher criticism



WHO stands for:

Worthless Heath Organization


President Trump was right this week to sharply criticize the inexcusable conduct of the World Health Organization (WHO) regarding the novel coronavirus pandemicand to threaten to cut U.S. funding for that United Nations organization.

The U.S. contributed over $400 million to the WHO last year – far more than any other nation. China contributed $44 million.

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attacked Trump on Wednesday. “If you don’t want many more body bags, you refrain from politicizing it,” Tedros told reporters.

Tedros was reacting to Trump’s sharp comments Tuesday, when Trump tweeted that the WHO was “China-centric” and “really blew it.”

“And literally, they called every shot wrong,” the president told Sean Hannity on his Fox News program “Hannity” Tuesday night, explaining why the U.S. might stop contributing to the U.N. organization.

As harsh as the president’s criticisms were, they did not go far enough.

The WHO bears responsibility for helping China spread the coronavirus far beyond China’s borders. What should have been merely a local outbreak that began in China became a worldwide pandemic as a result of the actions of Beijing and the WHO.

As of Wednesday night there were nearly 90,000 confirmed deaths caused by the coronavirus around the world, including almost 15,000 in the U.S. The actual death toll is surely higher, because people are not usually tested for the virus after death and because China is deliberately underreporting its own death toll.

The WHO’s primary sin is its early support of China’s false claim that the novel coronavirus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, could not be transmitted person-to-person.

WHO issued a now-infamous tweet Jan. 14 repeating China’s position. There was, the U.N. organization declared, “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

Doctors in Wuhan, China knew of human-to-human transmissions by the second week of December, which means Communist Party leaders in Beijing had to know soon afterward.

Chinese leaders not only tried to keep this critical information secret – a highly irresponsible action – but went further and tried to deceive the world into thinking the coronavirus was not contagious in this manner.

Moreover, the WHO also helped Beijing spread the disease in other ways. The U.N. organization urged countries to keep their borders open to travelers who ultimately carried the disease beyond China, with deadly consequences.

“WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the information currently available on this event,” the organization stated Jan. 10.

China’s secrecy and deception did not seem to bother Director-General Tedros, however. In late January, he praised Beijing, saying “China’s response to the coronavirus showed the superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries.”

At the same time, the WHO went out of its way to take Beijing’s side in its relentless campaign to take over Taiwan. The WHO, supporting another Chinese position, unjustifiably delayed declaring the coronavirus epidemic in China a “public health emergency of international concern.”



Took this screenshot just before the 'Barry Genuflection'.


Moreover, the WHO backed the reliability of Beijing’s statistics. “I didn’t see anything that suggested manipulation of numbers,” Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO director-general, told The New York Times in early March.

China’s cover-up to hide the true number of its new COVID-19 cases and deaths, aided by WHO, lulled the U.S. into a false sense of security.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the federal government’s coronavirus response coordinator, said March 31 at the White House daily press briefing that when U.S. officials initially reviewed China’s statistics they thought the coronavirus would be no worse than SARS, the 2002-03 flu-like epidemic.

In other words, China’s numbers led U.S. officials to believe the coronavirus was not going to become a pandemic affecting America.

“The medical community made – interpreted the Chinese data as, that this was serious but smaller than anyone expected, because I think probably we were missing significant amount of the data, now that when we see what happened to Italy and we see what happened to Spain,” Birx said.

Did the WHO gain anything by its subservience to Beijing? Aylward, of the WHO, told reporters Wednesday that his organization’s cozy relations with China were justified. “It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this,” he said.

Yet the WHO was not allowed to send its team to Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, until Feb. 20 – months after the first case was spotted there.

Only part of the WHO’s team was allowed an abbreviated visit of two days, during which there was no time for anything but get-to-know-you meetings. Accounts say the WHO came away from Wuhan with nothing substantive.

Beijing obviously has something to hide in Wuhan, but no one in the WHO seems to have any desire to find out what it might be.

The World Health Organization has acted disgracefully, inexplicably supporting Beijing’s position at every turn. “China-centric?” You bet.

Only one world figure had the courage to publically call out the WHO. That person is President Trump. The U.S. will have to defund the WHO if the organization insists on being complicit with China’s malign objectives.







Share/Bookmark

Florida man freed from jail because of coronavirus killed man the very next day




What a wonderful display of gratitude.



A Florida man is accused of killing a man the day after being released from jail because of fears that coronavirus could spread in corrections facilities, authorities said Tuesday.

Edward Williams, 26, of Tampa, was arrested Monday and is facing charges of second-degree murder, gun possession, violently resisting an officer, drug possession and paraphernalia possession, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said.

He remained in lockup Tuesday night with no bond, according to jail records.Joseph Edward Williams, 26.Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office

Williams was freed last month, six days after being arrested on suspicion of heroin possession, a third-degree felony, and possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor, according to jail records.

A state judge had authorized the local sheriff "to release any pretrial detainee arrested for a municipal or county ordinance violation, a misdemeanor offense, a criminal traffic offense,or a third-degree felony offense."

"The order was drafted in an effort to lower the risk of the spread of COVID-19 within the Hillsborough County detention facilities and to protect the inmates, deputies and civilian staff working within the jails," the sheriff's department said in a statement.

On March 20, a man was fatally shot in a community called Progress Village, sheriff's officials said. Williams was allegedly involved in the slaying, authorities said.

"There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense." Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement Tuesday.

The sheriff's statement, however, acknowledged that Williams could also have been freed on those prior charges if he had come up with $2,500 bond.

"Judges, prosecutors and sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety," Chronister said. "Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak."

NBC News affiliate WFLA of Tampa reports that the sheriff's department has so far released 164 low-level and non-violent offenders.

Just like this one.





Share/Bookmark

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

State Department leaked cables renew theories on origin of coronavirus





Maybe they’re finally catching on?

Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs below… we are where we are because of assholes like him. Common sense tells us if somehow C-19 just occurred naturally why wouldn’t the Chinese be seeking help instead of trying everything possible to cover it up? If it truly came from the wet markets why were they so quick to re-open them? Why would you do that so soon unless you knew positively it was not the origin of C-19?






Xi Jinping stopped flights from Wuhan to the rest of China but allowed international flights to continue deliberately infecting the entire planet. There is no other explanation. If he cared one iota about the human race he would not have allowed it.

-------------------------------







State Department cables obtained by The Washington Post warned about the safety and security of coronavirus testing on bats in China in 2018; Gillian Turner reports.

Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. 

A Chinese laboratory at the center of new theories about how the coronaviruspandemic started was the subject of multiple urgent warnings inside the U.S. State Department two years ago, according to a new report.

U.S. Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab and passed on information about scientists conducting risky research on coronavirus from bats, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.


Those cables have renewed speculation inside the U.S. government about whether Wuhan-based labs were the source of the novel coronavirus, although no firm connection has been established. The theory, however, has gained traction in recent days.

The United Kingdom has said that the idea that the virus, which has turned into a full-blown global pandemic, was leaked from a Wuhan lab is "no longer being discounted."

A member of the U.K. government's emergency committee of senior officials claimed Sunday: "There is a credible alternative view (to the zoonotic theory) based on the nature of the virus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is a laboratory in Wuhan."

Foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang said in a recent opinion piece on Fox News that "many Chinese believe the virus either was deliberately released or accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a P4-level bio-safety facility."

He added: "This lab, known for studying coronaviruses, is not far from the market that had been initially identified as the source of the outbreak."

In a series of diplomatic cables labeled "Sensitive But Unclassified," U.S. Embassy officials warned that the lab had massive management weaknesses, posed severe health risks and warned Washington to get involved.

The first cable, which was obtained by the Post, also sent red flags about the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and more specifically how their potential human transmission represented the risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

"During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory," the Jan.19, 2018 cable, written by two officials from the embassy's environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists, said.

The cable argued that the United States should give Chinese researchers at the Wuhan lab more support because its research on bat coronaviruses was important and dangerous. The lab had already been receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch.


The cable also called attention to Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who in November 2017 published a paper that showed the horseshoe bats collected from a case in Yunnan province were most likely from the same bat population that had been behind the first SARS coronavirus in 2003.

The cable states that "the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention."

Despite evidence that points to dangerous practices inside the Wuhan labs, top U.S. military brass, as well as other senior officials, have told Fox News that the origins of COVID-19 did not come from a laboratory nor was it the result of a bioweapon.

"And if I could just be clear, there is nothing to that," Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs told Fox News last week. "Someone asked me if I was worried. That is not something that I'm worried about. I think, you know, right now what we're concerned about is how do we treat people who are sick, how do we prevent people from getting sick. But no, I am not worried about this as a bioweapon."

Still, there are others who have been trying to trace the origin of the novel coronavirus back to the Wuhan lab.








Share/Bookmark

The Chinese say this is when it all started














Share/Bookmark

Monday, April 13, 2020

A picture is worth a thousand words






World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus greets Xi Jinping.



Clearly, we know who's really running the show.









Share/Bookmark