Connect with us

Healthcare

WHO Director Says Politicizing COVID19 Leads To ‘body bags,’ But He Was Accused Of Covering Up Epidemics In Ethiopia

Published

on

WHO Director tedros adhanom ghebreyesus

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, was accused in 2017 of “covering up three cholera epidemics in his home country, Ethiopia, when he was health minister,” and now his overt support of China – from where the coronavirus pandemic emerged – is forcing the Trump administration to reassess whether to pull U.S. funding from the organization.

At the time of the cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia, the New York Times published a damning report suggesting officials were extremely concerned about his future role as Director General.

Just recently, Dr. Tedros and his organization have come under fire by President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, he accused the WHO of being “China-centric” amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump told reporters at the White House during his daily press briefing that he was reassessing U.S. funding to the organization. For example, the U.S. has provided the agency with $893 million during the WHO’s current two-year funding period. According to reports, that includes about $236 million in dues.

“They’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” Trump said. “We’re going to put a hold on money to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it.”

In response, Dr. Tedros said that politicizing the coronavirus will invite more “body bags.” The President has indicated that he’s strongly considering pausing funding for the WHO, which misled the world with early advisories disseminating misinformation about how the virus is spread.

In 2017, however, it was Dr. Tedros who was under fire after an advisor to Dr. David Nabarro, his opponent for the Directorship at the time came forward with the accusation. that he covered up Cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia, according to the Times report. Dr. Tedros said he was “not surprised at all but quite disappointed” by the claims and dismissed the calls, which were also made by high-ranking British health officials, as a “last-minute smear campaign,” the report stated.

Before serving the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros was Ethiopia’s health minister between 2005 to 2012. Some of Ethiopia’s regular outbreaks of Cholera occurred during his tenure.

Lawrence O. Gostin, the director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University warned then that the WHO “might lose its legitimacy” by bringing in someone who worked for a country that had a history of covering up the Cholera outbreaks, some of which occurred under Dr. Tedros’ watch.

“Dr. Tedros is a compassionate and highly competent public health official,” he said at the time. “But he had a duty to speak truth to power and to honestly identify and report verified cholera outbreaks over an extended period.”

Click here to read the full New York Times report.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

COVID-19

Former Harvard medical professor says he was fired for opposing Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates

Published

on

Covid

“My hope is that someday, Harvard will find its way back to academic freedom and independence.” That is the heartfelt message from Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard University professor of medicine since 2003, who recently announced publicly he was fired for “clinging to the truth” in his opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

Kulldorff posted the news on social media alongside an essay published in the City Journal last week. The epidemiologist and biostatistician also spoke with National Review about the incident. Kulldorff says he was fired by the Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham hospital system and put on a leave of absence by Harvard Medical School in November 2021 over his stance on Covid.

Nearly two years later, in October 2023, his leave of absence was terminated as a matter of policy, marking the end of his time at the university. Harvard severed ties with Kulldorff “all on their initiative,” he said.

The history of the medical professional’s public stance on Covid-19 vaccines and mandates is detailed by National Review:

Censorship and rejection led Kulldorff to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 alongside Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University. Together, the three public-health scientists argued for limited and targeted Covid-19 restrictions that “protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives,” as Kulldorff put it in his essay.

“The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous,” he wrote, naming former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as the one who ordered a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration.

Testifying before Congress in January, Collins reaffirmed his previous statements attacking the Great Barrington Declaration.

Despite the coordinated effort against it, the document has over 939,000 signatures in favor of age-based focused protection.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors, who advocated the quick reopening of schools, have been vindicated by recent studies that confirm pandemic-era school closures were, in fact, detrimental to student learning. The data show that students from third through eighth grade who spent most of the 2020–21 school year in remote learning fell more than half a grade behind in math scores on average, while those who attended school in person dropped a little over a third of a grade, according to a New York Times review of existing studies. In addition to learning losses, school closures did very little to stop the spread of Covid, studies show.

Continue Reading

Trending