Republican senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Flordia have introduced a bill to withhold US taxpayer funds from the World Health Organization until it reforms its leadership.
The legislation introduced on Tuesday, called the World Health Organization (WHO) Accountability Act, aims to hold WHO accountable for what senators say is playing a role in China’s early cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was just beginning to spread across China.
“Time and again, [WHO] prioritized advancing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party rather than building a healthier world, “Hawley said in a statement on Tuesday, naming WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and” other WHO leaders “as those who “should be held responsible for this abandonment of duty.”
He added that “WHO must undertake comprehensive reform before it can benefit from US tax dollars again.”
President Biden announced on his first day in office that he would reestablish the United States’ relationship with WHO after former President Trump severed ties with the organization due to the initial treatment of COVID-19 and alleged prejudice against China. The United States was previously a major contributor to WHO, donating about $ 450 million a year.
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Scott said in a statement that WHO “failed” in its mission to release public information about the coronavirus to the world.
“Last February, I asked WHO to do its own in-depth analysis of the extent and origins of the coronavirus. It took almost a year to act and we still don’t have an answer,” said Scott. “They even abandoned the investigation to see if COVID-19 leaked from Wuhan’s laboratory.”
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A WHO team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic considered it “unlikely” that the virus leaked from a laboratory near Wuhan, China, during a news conference on Tuesday.
Instead, the coronavirus probably spread from an animal to humans, said WHO food safety and animal disease expert Peter Ben Embarek. WHO and China faced strong criticism from around the world because of their response to the pandemic, as China prevented WHO investigators from entering Wuhan for months; they finally arrived in mid-January this year.
Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. (Photo: HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP via Getty Images)
The bill would retain WHO’s US taxpayer dollars until it replaced its top leadership on January 1 and accepted Taiwan as a member state, and would limit funding to match the main contributor. China refuses to allow Taiwan’s accession, claiming it would violate its “One China” policy.
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“WHO also needs to answer for its refusal to include Taiwan in its members, meetings and information, especially in the face of the coronavirus. They are complicit in China’s communist effort to isolate Taiwan,” said Scott. “There is no reason for US taxpayers to spend hundreds of millions a year, more than any other country, to finance WHO without significant reforms.”
WHO did not designate the new coronavirus as a “public health emergency of international interest” until January 30, although tweeted on a “group of pneumonia cases” in Wuhan on January 4.
Chinese President Xi Jinping waited until January 20 to publicly recognize the virus, despite the fact that hospitalizations were already taking place on January 4.
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The timeline of initial COVID-19 reports later became even more confusing.
The UN-backed global health agency was investigated in July for altering its COVID-19 event timeline after revealing that it first heard about the Internet virus outbreak in late December 2019, and not by Beijing officials in January. 2020, as he insisted a lot.
In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks by video with patients and medical professionals at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province. (Xie Huanchi / Xinhua via AP)
According to several reports, the reviews were made on the WHO website on June 29, adding fuel to the fire that the Chinese leadership had long intended to cover up the new virus and that WHO helped them do so.
The revised text said that on December 31, 2019, “the WHO Office in the People’s Republic of China collected a statement to the media from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on its website on ‘viral pneumonia’ cases in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China, “but added that” the WHO open source intelligence platform also obtained a Chinese report from Finance Sina, a Chinese agency, about the same group of cases in Wuhan, attributed to ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’.
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WHO said earlier that its first knowledge of the coronavirus resulted from an alert issued by the Wuhan municipal health commission, the AFP noted. However, the schedule change now clarifies that the first notification came from the WHO Beijing office, not from the Beijing authorities.
The organization is still investigating the origins of COVID-19 and suggested that it probably spread from an animal to humans.
Hollie McKay and Evie Fordham of Fox News contributed to this report.