WHO

Trump pulls U.S. out of World Health Organization, slaps penalties on China over Hong Kong action

President Trump announced Friday the U.S. is terminating its relationship with the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronarvirus crisis, and took limited actions to punish China for misleading the world on the virus and for its security crackdown on Hong Kong. Mr. Trump also announced he was ending U.S. preferential treatment for Hong Kong, as Beijing moves to curb its autonomy. “Chinese officials ignored their reporting obligations to the World Health Organization and pressured the World Health Organization to mislead the world,” Mr. Trump said in a Rose Garden announcement at the White House. “The Chinese government has continually violated its promises to us and so many other nations. These plain facts cannot be overlooked or swept aside,” Mr. Trump said. Mr. Trump said the U.S. will redirect certain funding, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars per year, that would normally go to the WHO. For weeks, the administration threatened to enlist other organizations to conduct health projects it would normally fund under the leadership of WHO. Mr. Trump also suggested China allowed the virus to spread around the world, but not within China. “The world needs answers from China on the virus,” Mr. Trump said. “We must have transparency.” Deaths in the U.S. from the virus topped 100,000 this week, and business shutdowns to slow the spread have thrown roughly 40 million Americans out of work in less than three months. The president will impose sanctions on Hong Kong and Chinse officials who are involved in restricting freedoms in Hong Kong. He also said the U.S. is suspending the entry of “certain foreign nationals from China” as potential security risks. He further announced a move to study “differing practices” of certain Chinese companies trading in U.S. financial markets “with the goal of protecting U.S. investors.” But the actions did not appear as broad or as harsh as U.S. investors had feared. Major stock indexes rose in trading after Mr. Trump’s announcement. Rep. Chris Smith, a leading congressional critic of China’s human rights record, said past administrations answered China with “cheap rhetoric,” emboldening Chinese President Xi Jinping to be ever more aggressive. “President Trump, however, is beginning to change that and is doing what previous presidents have failed to do,” the New Jersey Republican said. “For the sake of oppressed people, the United States — even if we have to go it alone — must impost sanctions.” The president said Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong “is a tragedy for the people of Hong Kong, the people of China and indeed, the people of the world.”

Indeed..  And we need to do much more to punish China.  But, this is a good first step by the Trump Administration.  And, hey..  It’s far more than Hillary or Joe Biden would ever do.

Opinion/Analysis: Trump right to stop funding World Health Organization over its botched coronavirus response

President Trump was right to announce Tuesday that he will immediately stop funding the World Health Organization, which was scheduled to get $893 million from the U.S. in the current two-year funding period. The president’s action is the first step needed to spark meaningful reform of the United Nations organization and the global health architecture. Trump last week signaled he was unhappy with the WHO. In an interview aired April 7 on “Hannity” on Fox News, Trump suggested the U.S. might stop contributing to the organization. By Tuesday, Trump had seen enough. “So much death has been caused by their mistakes,” Trump said of the WHO. He is absolutely correct. The WHO helped spread the coronavirus in four principal ways. First, in public the WHO disseminated China’s false narrative that the virus was not transmissible person-to-person. The U.N. organization, however, knew or should have known the Chinese government was not telling the truth. Among other things, Taiwan on Dec. 31 told the U.N. body it suspected the pathogen was contagious in this fashion – and WHO professionals also knew that to be the case. Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO doctor, said at a press briefing on Monday that “right from the start” she thought the coronavirus was human-to-human transmissible, but senior WHO leadership disregarded the evidence of this. Second, the WHO in its public statements supported the Chinese government’s attempt to prevent the imposition of travel bans and quarantines on travelers from China. It was these travelers who turned an epidemic in central China into a global pandemic. Third, the WHO publicly backed the reliability of Beijing’s statistics. China’s substantial undercounting of its coronavirus cases and deaths lulled the U.S. into not taking precautions it would otherwise have adopted. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said March 31 that her team reviewed China’s statistics and thought the coronavirus outbreak would be no worse than SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), the 2002-03 epidemic that effected more than 8,000 people in 26 countries. It was not until Birx saw the coronavirus strike Italy and Spain that the White House realized the truth – the coronavirus was far more dangerous than the Chinese government claimed. But by then it was too late. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key Trump adviser in the coronavirus crisis has made comments similar to Birx. As of Tuesday, there were nearly 2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 – the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus – around the world, including nearly 610,000 in the U.S. There were over 126,000 deaths confirmed worldwide, including nearly 26,000 in the U.S. However, all these figures are understated because of Chinese underreporting and because few people around the world have been tested. Fourth, the WHO unreasonably delayed declaring the coronavirus epidemic a “public health emergency of international concern” until Jan. 30. The WHO, President Trump correctly said Tuesday, failed its “basic duty and must be held accountable.” There is no nation in a position to hold the WHO accountable other than the U.S., which gives the WHO far more money than does any other country. “As the organization’s leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability,” Trump correctly said. Trump’s withdrawal of funding does not mean the U.S. is abandoning the world during the middle of a pandemic. “We will continue to engage with the WHO to see if it can make meaningful reforms,” Trump pledged. “For the time being, we will redirect global health and directly work with others.” Who are these others? The U.S. can work with Taiwan, which of all the countries in the world has had arguably the best response to the coronavirus pandemic. But Taiwan is the one country the World Health Organization – bowing to Beijing’s demands – will not work with. This shunning of the island republic was something painfully evident from Dr. Bruce Aylward’s March 28 interview with Hong Kong’s RTHK. The senior adviser to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused to talk about Taiwan. Now, after Trump’s announcement, the global community has the opportunity to work closely with a valuable partner. Of course, it’s not certain Trump will be able to fashion a better response to the coronavirus pandemic in the middle of the emergency, but defunding the WHO was a precondition for doing so. Thanks to Trump taking the right step Tuesday, at least now there is hope.

Agreed!  And well said, Gordon.  That article written by Gordon Chang, came out a couple weeks ago.  But, the message is real-time, and the next time you hear some HollyWEIRD elitist liberal, or Democrat politician, rail against Trump for cutting off funding to he WHO, re-read this article.  Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China.” Follow him on Twitter @GordonGChang

Trump plans action against China and WHO for failing to stop spread of the coronavirus

President Trump said Wednesday his administration is developing “very distinct” recommendations to hold the World Health Organization and China accountable for the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. “We’re not happy about it, and we are by far the largest contributor to WHO,” Mr. Trump told reporters during an Oval Office meeting with Louisiana’s governor. “They misled us. They’re literally a pipe organ for China.” The president has instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to look into whether the WHO and China withheld information about the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. “It’s coming in, I’m getting pieces already,” Mr. Trump said of the probe. “There’s nothing positive about what happened in China.” The president said he will be coming out soon with a recommendation about the WHO, “with China to follow.” Mr. Trump reiterated that the disease “could have been stopped at the source” in Wuhan, China, late last year. Since reaching the U.S. in January, the virus has infected more than 1 million Americans and claimed the lives of more than 58,000. “They should have been able to stop it,” the president said of the WHO and the Chinese government. “And then why did China allow planes to fly out, but not into China? Planes were coming out of Wuhan, and going all over the world. They were going to Italy, very big time to Italy. But they’re not going into China. What was that all about? We’re not happy with it.” Mr. Trump noted that he wrapped up a trade deal at the White House in January with Chinese officials as the crisis was worsening in China. But he said Chinese officials didn’t warn him. “You would have thought that somebody could have said ‘hey.’ They could have stopped it at the source,” Mr. Trump said. “They didn’t have to let airplanes fly out, and loads of people come out.” The president banned travelers from China on Jan. 31, except for thousands of U.S. citizens returning.

This is a positive start.  China and the WHO need to be held to account.  For the WHO, we need to cut off funding to them PERMANENTLY, or until they have new leadership NOT tied to China, and have undergone serious reforms worthy of our sending them hard-earned monies from American taxpayers.  But, for now, we shouldn’t send them one dime.  As for China..  They need to be shamed publicly at the UN, the U.S., and our allies.  Then we need to make them pay monetarily for the damage they’ve cost us.  Then, we need to bring back manufacturing of critical products (i.e. pharmaceuticals, etc.) to the U.S. that we’ve been importing from China for decades, and it is now a national security issue.  And, as always, we need to stop buying so much cheap crap made in China.  If you the option to buy something made in China and a comparable product that’s maybe a couple bucks more, but it’s made in the USA, then PLEASE PLEASE PEASE BUY AMERICAN!!!   Let’s tell the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) what we think of them, and vote with our wallets.

Gutfeld on Trump dumping the WHO

Well, the big orange meanie strikes again! “I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” President Trump announced at a Tuesday press conference. “Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death.” As if on cue, the media spewed. “This is an attempt by the president to steer you away from his own actions,” CNN’s John King said. The network’s Jim Acosta chimed in, “If you go through the scapegoats that he’s blamed for this coronavirus pandemic, the WHO, members of the news media, Democrats in Congress.” It’s a reaction we’ve come to expect from the children in the room, none of whom cared much about the pandemic because they were too busy smoking the crack pipe of impeachment. Are you surprised by Trump’s actions? Are you like the media, in which every day is the first day of Trump’s presidency? No. You get it. Trump’s strategy, from day one, has been based on incentives. He asks how can we expect the WHO to do better if it’s going to get our millions anyway. The WHO is like everything in Trump’s orbit. He’s going to kick its tires, demand oversight, threaten to pull out. Nothing is off-limits, especially an organization notorious for abuse. Trump just spanked its leadership, which spent lavishly on travel just to be China’s mouthpiece. If their house isn’t in order, why are we paying their rent? It’s a good question, one the media won’t ask. Of course, they pretend this is the end of the process when it’s really the start. Trump is shaking the box to see what happens next. It’s not new. And it works. This is why, in endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden, President Obama spent 12 minutes saying nothing. The endorsement hinged on personality: Trump is mean. But Joe is nice. Unless your name is Tara. The problem with Barack’s endorsement? The proof! Does the stock market crash when Trump reams Acosta? Does unemployment rise when Trump invents new nicknames? Nope. All Obama had was a complaint as gray as he is. Yeah, we get it. Mr. Trump is mean. But he’s mean on our behalf. And the media implode because Trump dares to demand competence from people soaking us for millions. I guess if it were Biden, Mr. Nice Guy would have just sniffed their hair and called it a day.

Exactly!!  Thanks as usual to Greg Gutfeld for calling it, not just as he sees it…but as most Americans do.  That was adapted from Greg Gutfeld’s monologue on “The Five” on April 15, 2020.  Thanks Greg!!    🙂

Trump cuts off U.S. funding to WHO, pending review

President Trump said the U.S. will stop funding to the World Health Organization while his administration reviews its role in “mismanaging” the coronavirus. He said the U.S. contributes up to $400 million while superpowers like China, where the outbreak began, contribute closer to $40 million. “The United States has a duty to insist on full accountability,” Mr. Trump said. He cited the WHO’s lack of pushback to Beijing’s foggy reporting on the virus in the early going, saying it cost the rest of the world valuable time. He also blasted the WHO’s opposition to bans on travel from China, accusing it of putting “political correctness above life-saving measures.” “Countless more lives would have been saved. Instead, look at the rest of the world,” he said, citing the rampant spread of the virus in Europe. He said U.S. funding wasn’t put to good use and the WHO failed to vet and share information in a timely fashion.

President Trump is exactly right for doing this.  If you scroll down about 12 articles, you’ll see one on how we pay 10 times what China does to the WHO, and the WHO is basically a propaganda organ for China.  So, major kudos to President Trump for saying enough is enough, and putting a freeze on U.S. taxpayer funding to the WHO, until it shows it actually cares about WORLD health; not China’s image.

US gives 10 times the amount of money to WHO than China

As coronavirus continues to cripple almost every country on earth, questions are being raised over the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the top brass at the World Health Organization (WHO). Earlier this week, President Trump accused the specialized United Nations agency of acting too slowly on the escalating crisis, and deemed it “very China-centric.” He affirmed in both a tweet and later at a press briefing on Tuesday that his administration is “going to look into” the money U.S. taxpayers give to WHO – and potentially freeze it – given that Americans are the largest donors. So exactly how much is China forking out to have attained such an apparent influence? Well, nowhere near the United States. “In short, the total contributions of China versus the U.S. is $86 million versus $893 million,” David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told Fox News. “The U.S. contributes nearly 10 times the amount China does.” Here is how it works. WHO operates on a two-year budget, and invoices members with two annual payments. It receives its money – usually totaling around $4.5 billion per year – through two streams. The first is referred to as “assessed” or mandatory contributions, which is considered core funding from its member states, and are based upon expected amounts scaled by population and income. These make up just under 20 percent of the total budget. The second stream is “voluntary,” provided by member states, private individuals and organizations, and makes up the bulk of WHO’s revenue. “Nations are assessed membership fees based on their gross domestic product and population size,” Dennis Santiago, a global risk and financial analyst surmised. “Nations and foundations can also make additional voluntary contributions to the general fund and for special designated projects, including outbreak and crisis response.” The United States pays the highest assessment fee to the WHO. The March 2020 WHO’s financials indicates that the United States’ current year assessment is $57,883,460. This is almost twice China’s 2020 assessment of $28,719,905 to the organization’s annual budget, the second-largest assessment in WHO’s budget. Based on WHO’s financial reports as of March 2020, China committed to an assessment of $28,719,905 to the organization’s annual budget. The current year amount is presently outstanding. China appears to be up to date in its payments; there are no amounts in arrears from prior years on WHO’s report. The U.S. has a balance of an additional $41,284,915 from prior years that have not been remitted, for an outstanding U.S. total funding assessment of $99,168,375. This amount is around one-third of the total $257,470,000 WHO is awaiting as of the end of March 2020. The U.S. and China have the two most substantial contribution assessments to WHO in 2020, followed by Japan and Germany.

How crazy is this?!?   American taxpayers, whether they like it or not, pay almost a BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR of their hard-earned taxes to this corrupt, agenda-driven, pro-China  UN-type health organization, that does nothing for us, and yet basically covers for all of China’s health atrocities.  And, yet, China only pays a tenth of what Americans shell out to this worthless organization!  This story should infuriate every clear-thinking American, regardless of party affiliation.  And, after how the WHO has handled this whole Wuhan virus crisis, we need to cut off ALL funding to them until they get rid of the current leadership and show they are no longer a proxy for China’s propaganda.  For more, click on the text above.

China lied about coronavirus, putting world in jeopardy, US intelligence agents say

As coronavirus cases have jumped in recent days, China misled the world by purposely underreporting its numbers of patients and deaths, three U.S. intelligence officials say. In a classified report sent to the White House, the officials said that China’s public record of COVID-19 infections was deliberately deceptive and incomplete. Bloomberg, which first reported the news, cited three U.S. intelligence officers who said they alerted the White House last week to Beijing’s misleading numbers. Two of the three sources called the numbers flat-out fake. While there have been skeptics all along, China’s decision to downplay its numbers could have deadly consequence for the rest of the world. Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to COVID-19, said Tuesday that China’s numbers influenced assumptions in other countries about the nature of the contagion. “The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has been accused of multiple coverups. It has shifted its timeline on what it knew and when it knew it and has gone after critics, doctors and whistleblowers trying to sound the alarm. In recent weeks, China has launched a coordinated campaign to boost its global image. It has rebranded itself, tried to restart its economy and sold supplies to hard-hit countries struggling to contain the virus within their borders. “The only thing better than playing themselves as a victim is showing that they can emerge as a resilient hero,” Greg Barbaccia, an expert in counterintelligence, insider threat and corporate espionage, told Fox News. Barbaccia, who spent five years on active duty as an intelligence sergeant in the U.S. Army, said China is taking advantage of the current economic landscape and using it to their advantage as other countries like Italy and Iran struggle. Not only has China clogged up its own airwaves with propaganda touting the country’s success in taming COVID-19, it has also pledged millions of dollars to the World Health Organization and in return has received public accolades. A U.N. report released Wednesday praised China for sharing the genetic sequence of COVID-19. What it didn’t highlight was that Chinese officials didn’t report the first case of coronavirus until forced to and that documents later revealed that China knew about the dangers of the virus two months before reporting it. Had China been forthright, COVID-19 could have been contained. On Wednesday, there were more than 847,081 confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world. The U.S. surpassed 200,000 cases Wednesday. Globally, the number of those infecting will likely hit the million mark by Friday. In the United States there have been 4,417 deaths. The body count globally stands at 45,497.