First up, from SkyNews Australia:
World Health Organisation's 'China centric' leader launches bizarre attack on Taiwan
The leader of the World Health Organisation has gone on a bizarre rant attacking Taiwan while claiming to be the victim of racist comments and death threats. WHO general manager Tedros Adhanom was responding to calls he should resign for failing to condemn China’s role in covering up the coronavirus crisis which has since killed more than 87,000 people.
“This (racial) attack came from Taiwan,” he said. “We need to be honest. I will be straight today. From Taiwan. “And Taiwan, the Foreign Ministry also, they know the campaign. They didn’t disassociate themselves. They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur, but I didn’t care.”
Sky News Australia revealed yesterday Mr Adhanon was blocking the release of the names of doctors who voted against declaring a global health emergency in late January, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Two days prior to that decision Mr Adhanom was photographed happily smiling with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. China was at that stage lobbying the world, Including Australia, not to implement economically devastating travel bans.
US President Donald Trump has also threatened to withdraw funding from the WHO and formally investigate the body he described as being "China centric". Mr Adhanom and the WHO drew global criticism two weeks ago when one of its senior doctors awkwardly dodged questions about Taiwan, an independent country China regards as a rebel region which must be reunited with the mainland. ...MOREThat interview, with a reporter from Honk Kong's public broadcaster, Radio Television Hong Kong, was epic in shining a light of WHO-Taiwan relations:
The interviewee, Dr. Bruce Aylward was one of the Assistant Directors-General at the WHO but seems to have been disappeared after his performance.
First he feigned not hearing the question, then disconnected the call and when RTHK called back went into full-on bureaucrat obfuscation.
This latest though may have more to do with Taiwan's warning to the WHO in 2019 that the coronavirus was transmissible, human - to - human.
Here's The Asia Time March 27:
WHO ‘refused to act’ on Taiwan’s virus alert
The self-governing territory sounded the alarm when Covid-19 first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan
The Taiwanese government has said it sounded the alarm at the end of last year about possible human-to-human transmission of a new coronavirus when it first started to strike people down in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Yet its warning went unheeded by the World Health Organization (WHO), of which the island is not a member due to disputes over its statehood.There's more, maybe tomorrow.
The self-governing island’s officials have confirmed a previous report by the Financial Times claiming the WHO failed to pass on Taiwan’s warning about the contagious pathogen Covid-19 at the end of December. The warning was issued after cadres in Wuhan vehemently repudiated claims that a mysterious form of pneumonia was spreading among the city’s residents. They decreed that New Year celebrations and annual municipal conferences would proceed as scheduled.
Quoting several Taiwanese officials, including Vice-President Chen Chien-jen, an epidemiologist-turned-politician, the British broadsheet alleged that despite Taiwan’s concerns, the WHO failed to act.
Taiwan’s health and foreign affairs officials said at a press conference earlier this week that the island had learned about an emerging atypical respiratory disease in Wuhan from Taiwanese expats there in December. Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control then tried to seek clarification and more information from its Chinese counterpart as well as the WHO’s International Health Regulations framework on December 31. Taiwan’s representative office in Geneva, where the WHO is headquartered, also tried to contact the secretariat of the United Nations agency on health....MUCH MORE
