Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Flordia have filed a bill to withhold U.S. taxpayer funds from the World Health Organization until it passes leadership reforms.
The legislation enacted on Tuesday, called the World Health Organization (WHO) Accountability Act, aims to hold the WHO accountable for what senators claim to play a role in China’s early coverage of the COVID 19 pandemic when it had just started spreading through China.
“Time and time again, [WHO] “prioritizing the interests of the Chinese Communist Party over building a healthier world,” Hawley said in a statement Tuesday, adding that WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and other WHO members leaders “named as those who” should be held accountable for this failure of duty. “
He added that “the WHO must undertake comprehensive reform before it can be allowed to benefit from US tax money again.”
President Biden announced on his first day in office that he would restore the United States’ relationship with the WHO after former President Trump severed ties with the organization over the early handling of COVID-19 and alleged prejudice against China. The US has previously been a major contributor to the WHO, donating about $ 450 million a year.
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Scott said in a statement that the WTO had ‘failed’ in its mission to spread public information about the coronavirus to the world.
“Last February, I called on the WHO to conduct its own in-depth analysis on the extent and origin of the coronavirus. It took them almost a year to take action and we still have no response. , “Scott said. “They even dropped their investigation into whether COVID-19 had leaked from the Wuhan laboratory.”
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A WHO team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic calls it ‘unlikely’ that the virus leaked from a laboratory near Wuhan, China, during a news conference on Tuesday.
Instead, the coronavirus probably spread from animal to human, said Peter Ben Embarek, the expert on food safety and animal diseases. The WHO and China have faced strong criticism from around the world over their pandemic response, as China has banned 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 origin of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP via Getty Images)
The bill would keep U.S. taxpayers dollars from the WHO until it replaces its leading leadership from January 1 and accepts Taiwan as a member state, limiting funding to the best contributor. China refuses to allow Taiwan, saying it would violate its “One China” policy.
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“The WHO must also respond to its refusal to include Taiwan in its membership, meetings and information, especially in light of the coronavirus. They are complicit in Communist China’s effort to isolate Taiwan,” Scott said. “There is no reason why US taxpayers should spend hundreds of millions more a year than any other country to fund the WHO without significant reform.”
WHO first identified the novel coronavirus on 30 January as a “public health emergency of international importance”, although it tweeted about a “cluster of pneumonia cases” in Wuhan on January 4.
Chinese President Xi Jinping waited until January 20 to publicly acknowledge the virus, despite the fact that hospitalizations had already taken place on January 4.
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The timeline of the initial COVID-19 reporting later blurred even more.
The UN-backed World Health Organization was scrutinized in July for changing its timeline of COVID-19 events after announcing at the end of December 2019 that it had heard of the internet’s outbreak of the internet, no. of Beijing officials in January 2020, as it has long insisted.
In this photo released by Chinese news agency Xinhua, Chinese President Xi Jinping talks via video with patients and medical workers at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. (Xie Huanchi / Xinhua via AP)
According to several reports, the review was done on the WTO website on June 29, which added fuel to the fire that the Chinese leadership had long put forward to disguise the new virus, and that WHO helped them with this.
The revised text stated that on December 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, China “but added that “the WHO’s open source intelligence platform also picked up a Chinese news report from Finance Sina, a Chinese outlet, about the same group of cases in Wuhan, which are attributed to ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’.
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WHO earlier said its first knowledge of the coronavirus stemmed from a warning issued by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, the AFP noted. However, the amendment of the timeline now states that the first notice came from the WTO office in Beijing rather than from the authorities in Beijing.
The organization is still investigating the origin of COVID-19 and has suggested that it is likely to spread from an animal to humans.
Fox News’ Hollie McKay and Evie Fordham contributed to this report.