Roderick Veelo – Trump is right, sanctions against WHO failure are justified

President Trump on Tuesday suspended the United States’ contribution to the World Health Organization (WHO). Last year, Americans donated € 508 million to this UN branch. This makes the United States the largest WHO sponsor.

Trump’s decision is bad at a time when the world is being held hostage by a virus that is causing illness, death, social disruption and a deep recession.

Many critics see yet more evidence that an idiot lives in the White House who wants to hide his own failure to curb the virus by blaming the WHO for the pandemic.

The World Health Organization does not receive a contribution from the United States until its action on COVID-19 is evaluated. The evaluation of a UN organization generally ends in a very close diplomatic compromise, and Trump does not seem to want to wait for that.

He judges that WHO has failed in its basic duty to do everything possible to prevent a pandemic like this.

It is obvious that we are dealing with a pandemic, but can the World Health Organization be blamed for that? Or are there other culprits?

For the answer we have to go back to Monday, December 30 of last year. That day, well-known whistleblower and emergency physician Ai Fen of Wuhan Central Hospital sees a series of photos of a patient with severe pneumonia. She raised the alarm with eight colleagues.

They further distribute the patient report. The cover has a “sars-like coronavirus” inside a red circle. Authorities confiscate the report and doctors are silenced.

In the fascinating search for “patient zero”, it has now been reconstructed that the first people in China’s Hubei province were infected with the coronavirus in November last year.

On January 2, the virus was identified, and on January 11, authorities provided evidence that it is spreading from person to person. They will only announce the existence and nature of the virus on January 20.

Person-to-person contamination is presented by Beijing as “limited risk.” Three weeks later, Dr. Ai Fen’s alarm and the cover where the danger had to “disappear” is carefully opened.

In the weeks when the Chinese people and the rest of the world were ignored by the Beijing authorities, the virus was given free rein to spread throughout the world.

And where was the World Health Organization?

It is no diplomatic secret that the WHO has been dominated by China in recent years. Former RTL colleague Marije Vlaskamp described last week in the Volkskrant expanded on how this UN organization is at the helm of the Chinese government.

For example, the WHO did not criticize doctors’ muzzles, the Chinese statements are taken indiscriminately, and the WHO relinquished its powers to gather more information in China than Beijing intended to provide.

Those powers had been given to the WHO to prevent Beijing, after the 2002 Sars epidemic stopped, from concealing a budding epidemic in the crucial first few weeks.

Correspondent Vlaskamp calls the attitude of the UN organization towards China the “fall of compliance”. Anyone who wants to take advantage of Chinese initiatives should not criticize Chinese leaders.

In this crisis, it becomes painfully clear that the WHO would rather knead Beijing than worry about the health of the world’s population. As a result, WHO has lost its credibility.

With lessons from the past, the use of powers, an alert and critical attitude towards the Chinese authorities and less favoritism, WHO could have saved the world from a pandemic.

The WHO has seriously failed and the President of the United States, Trump, has every reason to raise this and impose sanctions for this misconduct.

Because if the approaches of the WHO and China do not change, this pandemic, of course, will not be the last.

There must be pressure on the boiler in China. If authorities can get a hospital off the ground in 10 days, the world won’t have to wait 18 years to shut down those controversial food markets, which time and again prove to be the breeding ground for this type of disruptive virus.

If the World Health Organization improves your life, that American contribution will be paid again. But the beginning of all human suffering and economic catastrophe caused by the world’s crown virus belongs to a bill on the doormat of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his muzzle brigade.

This column was previously published on RTLZ.nl.