Hawley, Scott introduce bill to withhold taxpayer money to WHO until reforms made
Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Flordia have launched a bill to withhold U.S. taxpayer funds from the World Health Organization until it makes management reforms.
The laws launched Tuesday referred to as the World Health Organization (WHO) Accountability Act goals to maintain the WHO accountable for what the senators allege to be taking part in a task in China’s early coverup of the COVID-19 pandemic when it was simply beginning to unfold by way of China.
“Time and again, [WHO] has prioritized advancing the Chinese Communist Party’s interests over building a healthier world,” Hawley stated in a Tuesday assertion, naming WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and “other WHO leaders” as those that “must be held accountable for this dereliction of duty.”
He added that “the WHO must undertake comprehensive reform before it is allowed to benefit from U.S. tax dollars once again.”
President Biden introduced on his first day in workplace that he would reinstate the United States’ relationship with WHO after former President Trump minimize ties with the group over its early dealing with of COVID-19 and alleged bias towards China. The U.S. had beforehand been a high contributor to the WHO, donating about $450 million a 12 months.
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Scott stated in a press release that WHO has “failed” at its mission to unfold public details about coronavirus to the world.
“Last February, I called on the WHO to do its own in-depth analysis on the extent and origins of the coronavirus. It took them nearly a year to take action and we still have no answer,” Scott stated. “They have even dropped their investigation into whether COVID-19 leaked from Wuhan lab.”
A WHO group investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic referred to as it “unlikely” that the virus leaked from a lab close to Wuhan, China, throughout a information convention on Tuesday.
Instead, coronavirus seemingly unfold from an animal to people, WHO meals security and animal illnesses skilled Peter Ben Embarek stated. The WHO and China have confronted sturdy criticism from all over the world over their pandemic response, as China blocked WHO investigators from coming into Wuhan for months; they finally arrived in mid-January of this 12 months.
Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and different members of the World Health Organization (WHO) group investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive on the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP through Getty Images)
The bill would withhold U.S. taxpayer {dollars} from WHO until it replaces its high management as of Jan. 1 and accepts Taiwan as a member state, and restrict funding to match the highest contributor. China refuses to permit Taiwan to be a part of, saying doing so would violate its “One China” coverage.
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“The WHO also needs to answer for its refusal to include Taiwan in its membership, meetings, and information, especially in the face of the coronavirus. They are complicit in Communist China’s effort to isolate Taiwan,” Scott stated. “There is no reason U.S. taxpayers should be spending hundreds of millions a year, more than any other country, to fund the WHO without significant reform.”
WHO didn’t designate the novel coronavirus as a “public health emergency of international concern” until Jan. 30, although it tweeted a few “cluster of pneumonia cases” in Wuhan on Jan. 4.
Chinese President Xi Jinping waited until Jan. 20 to publicly acknowledge the virus, even if hospitalizations had been occurring as early as Jan. 4.
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The timeline of preliminary COVID-19 reporting grew to become much more blurred in a while.
The U.N.-backed international well being physique got here beneath scrutiny in July for altering its timeline of COVID-19 occasions after disclosing that it initially heard in regards to the virus outbreak from the Internet in late December 2019, not from Beijing officers in January 2020, because it had lengthy insisted.
In this photograph launched by China’s Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping talks by video with sufferers and medical employees on the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei Province. (Xie Huanchi/Xinhua through AP)
According to a number of studies, the revisions had been made on the WHO web site on June 29, including gas to the hearth that the Chinese management lengthy purported to cowl up the brand new virus and that WHO assisted them in doing so.
The revised textual content stated that on Dec. 31, 2019, “WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China” however added that “the WHO’s open-source intelligence platform also picked up a Chinese-language news report from Finance Sina, a Chinese outlet, about the same cluster of cases in Wuhan, attributed to a ‘pneumonia of unknown cause.”
WHO beforehand stated its first data of the coronavirus stemmed from an alert issued by the Wuhan municipal well being fee, the AFP famous. However, the timeline modification now clarifies that the primary notification got here from WHO’s Beijing workplace slightly than from Beijing authorities.
The group continues to be investigating the origins of COVID-19 and have urged that it seemingly unfold from an animal to people.
Fox News’ Hollie McKay and Evie Fordham contributed to this report.
