On Sunday, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” with host Margaret Brennan to discuss the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
During the segment, Brennan asked Gottlieb about the World Health Organization (WHO), which has been heavily scrutinized by President Trump and others for allegedly enabling China.
“We know that this is a global pandemic. The President has said that he is reviewing U.S. funding to the World Health Organization,” Brennan said. “The U.S. gives about a hundred million a year to it. They’re leading the response around the world. What changes do you think need to be made?”
Gottlieb replied:
Well, look, I don’t think this is a time to defund [at] WHO, given the fact that I think this is going to become epidemic in the Southern Hemisphere, in parts of the world that don’t have resources to deal with this kind of a global issue. But the President raised a lot of valid concerns.
China was not truthful with the world at the outset of this. Had they been more truthful with the world, which would have enabled them to be more truthful with themselves, they might have actually been able to contain this entirely, and there is some growing evidence to suggest that, as late as January 20th, they were still saying that there was no human-to-human transmission, and the WHO was validating those claims on January 14th, sort of enabling the obfuscation from China.
Gottlieb then suggested that when all is said and done, the WHO should look at China’s behavior as it pertained to the COVID-19 pandemic:
I think going forward, the WHO needs to commit to an after-action report that specifically examines what China did or didn’t tell the world, and how that stymied the global response to this.
“I also think they need to embrace Taiwan’s role in the global health community, and allow them to attend the World Health Assembly,” Gottlieb added. “Right now, they’ve frozen China out, the WHO has, at sort of the behest of China, and that’s hampered the global response because China’s been a very important partner. To give you just one more anecdote, China didn’t share the viral strains, and the WHO should have made them do that. Had they shared those early on we could have developed a diagnostic test earlier, validated [it] earlier.”
On Tuesday, as Brennan noted, President Trump appeared to call the WHO’s intentions into question during a Coronavirus Task Force press briefing, stating in part:
They have been wrong about a lot of things. They had a lot of information early and they didn’t want to … they seem to be very China-centric, and we have to look into that. So, we’re going to look into it … We want to look into it, World Health Organization, because they really are – they called it wrong. They called it wrong. They really, they missed the call.
“They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known, and they probably did know,” Trump said. “So, we’ll be looking into that very carefully.”
President Trump rightfully calls out the World Health Organization for getting so many things wrong. W.H.O. also better get ready for that ‘stop check’ notice from the U.S. pic.twitter.com/GswFKC8E0U
— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) April 7, 2020
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