Former Vice President Joe Biden told CBS on Monday that he’d reverse the Trump Administration’s decision to investigate the World Health Organization and revoke funding if it’s discovered that the WHO collaborated with China to hide the true extent of that country’s coronavirus pandemic.
The WHO is under scrutiny for accepting and then parroting China’s explanations and excuses for the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. As late as January 14th, half a month after the first coronavirus patient died in Wuhan, China, the WHO was insisting that human-to-human transmission of the virus was impossible — at least according to Chinese authorities.
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
In addition, the WHO cut Taiwan, which considers itself an independent country from mainland China, even though China does not, out of the program to address the coronavirus pandemic, despite Taiwan’s high rate of success at containing and treating its own coronavirus pandemic — a success rate much better than China’s.
On repeated occasions, the WHO ignored questions about Taiwan’s handling of the coronavirus and, at one point, when other country’s began to question its position on Taiwan’s independence, accused the island nation of waging a “racist” campaign against the WHO.
Concerned that the WHO had imperiled the United States’ coronavirus response, the United States opened an investigation in the global health body and has now threatened to revoke the hundreds of millions of dollars the U.S. provides each year, depriving the WHO of nearly half its operating budget.
Biden says the decision to defund the WHO is dangerous and that, as president, he’ll restore the WHO’s grant, according to the New York Post — and then some.
“But I’ll also insist that we … do what we were doing before. We had set up a pandemic office within the White House, President Obama. We had CDC forward stationed in other countries to anticipate when we might see a virus coming, a pandemic coming, because there are gonna be more of these. So I would get much more engaged in the world,” Biden said, neatly sidestepping recently uncovered information indicating that the Obama administration, of which he was a major part, was instrumental in funding the Wuhan virology lab that may have been responsible for isolating the novel coronavirus.
The National Institute of Health is now investigating that virology labl.
“We can’t step back. If in fact, for example, we solve the problem in the United States of America, and you don’t solve in the other parts of the world, you know what’s going to happen. We’re going to have travel bans, we’re not going to have to do economic intercourse with the world,” Biden added.
Biden opposed the President Donald Trump’s travel ban against China, instituted in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
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