Politics
HHS Criticizes WHO For Reliance On China, Says HHS Employees Working At WHO Were Not ‘Decision Makers’
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) criticized the World Health Organization for relying on China’s data, noting that the WHO’s information was “incorrect and relied too heavily on China.”
More than a dozen U.S. health experts, researchers and physicians worked at the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
The Trump administration received real-time information on coronavirus from these workers at the WHO, and said that their presence at the WHO “undercuts” President Donald Trump’s assertion that the WHO’s reliance on China’s data led to the spread of the virus in the United States, according to WaPo.
But HHS spokeswoman Caitlin B. Oakley noted in a statement to WaPo that these workers were not “decision makers” and received the same incorrect information from WHO officials — who relied on China’s data.
Seventeen HHS staff members were previously working at the WHO, including 16 staff members from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to Oakley, who said they were “working on a variety of programs, including covid-19 and Ebola.”
“Furthermore, I’d add that just because you have Americans embedded in WHO providing technical assistance does not change the information you are getting from WHO leadership,” Oakley said in an email. “We have learned now that WHO information was incorrect and relied too heavily on China.”
The HHS spokeswoman also told WaPo that the “lack of transparency aided and abided by WHO leadership hampered understanding of the virus and delayed the global response.”
HHS has not responded to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The United States has accused China of mishandling the pandemic by failing to warn the rest of the world about the virus and purposefully misrepresenting the number of deaths and cases within the country, though Bejiing has denied that this is the case. The U.S. intelligence community reportedly concluded in mid-March that China was falsifying data on coronavirus, prompting the CIA to look into the numbers as well.
President Donald Trump has not directly criticized China in recent weeks, but he frequently has criticized the WHO for being “China-centric,” and cut off U.S. funding for the WHO on Tuesday.
“The WHO’s reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide, and it may be much more than that,” Trump said Tuesday. “The WHO has not addressed a single one of these concerns nor provided a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes, of which there are many.”
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