WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus insisted that any allegation that his organization was close to China was an “outright lie.”
Tedros was asked by National Review reporter Jimmy Quinn if he regretted his initial handling of Covid, as concerns had been expressed that he had hewed too close to Beijing’s line.
“At one point or the other, we had issues with many countries,” Tedros responded. “If we had issues with many countries, it means maybe we’re doing the right thing. But the allegation that we’re close to China or something is an outright lie, actually.”
“People who try to build narratives, they say that,” he continued. “But from what happened, start from there, and until now, if you’ll see all the relationships we had with countries, and some of the misunderstandings with countries, sometimes with this country the other opposite allegation with the other, it’s because we focus on science.”
In June 2022, it was reported that Tedros “privately believes the Covid pandemic started following a leak from a Chinese laboratory,” according to a top government official. “While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread in late 2019.”
In May 2020, a report from Der Spiegel claimed WHO officials communicated with the Chinese government, and might have deliberately delayed giving other countries critical information about the spread of the novel coronavirus after being pressured by China and its president, Xi Jinping.
The report claimed that BND, the German Federal Intelligence Service, discovered that “Xi met with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on January 21” and asked WHO to delay reporting accurate information about the novel coronavirus, The Daily Caller reported.
WHO called the report “unfounded and untrue,” saying that the two had never spoken over phone.
Later, Tedros praised China, saying he appreciated the information the communist country provided to WHO.
“If you remember at the initial stage, you remember about the sequence, they provided the sequence immediately, and we appreciated that they shared the sequence of the virus Sars-CoV-2 immediately. And then there were other things like especially the measures they were taking on Wuhan to slow the speed of the spread to the rest of the world. And we identified that and we encouraged them to do that, because slowing the spread is very important,” he said.