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The Daily Caller News Foundation Forces Government To Release Emails Showing WHO-Connected Accountability Group Pushed To Praise China’s COVID-19 Response

• An accountability group connected to the World Health Organization pushed to praise China’s COVID response, emails obtained through a Daily Caller News Foundation lawsuit show.
• The lawsuit was filed after HHS failed to respond to an April 1, 2020, FOIA request from the DCNF asking for communications about the coronavirus between Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deputy Director Clifford Lane, and WHO officials.
• “There was consensus for the GPMB to issue a statement supportive of countries’ (especially China) and WHO response efforts, and to call for urgent actions to further strengthen global preparedness and response to this outbreak,” an email from a group connected to WHO to Dr. Anthony Fauci said.

An accountability group connected to the World Health Organization pushed to praise China’s COVID response, emails obtained through a Daily Caller News Foundation lawsuit show.

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board Secretariat, which works independently but is hosted by the WHO, sent a Jan. 28 email to Dr. Fauci with the subject line “TIME SENSITIVE Message from GPMB Co-Chairs: review of draft GPMB Statement on 2019-novel coronavirus.”

The January email pushed for approval of a statement praising “especially” China for the country’s response to the coronavirus.

“There was consensus for the GPMB to issue a statement supportive of countries’ (especially China) and WHO response efforts, and to call for urgent actions to further strengthen global preparedness and response to this outbreak,” the email said. “Please find attached a draft GPMB Statement.”

“Looks fine,” Fauci responded. “Please see my comments in attached document.”

Judicial Watch and the DCNF obtained the email in a batch of 300 pages of emails from the U.S. Department of Health through a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed May 4, 2020, on behalf of the DCNF.

The lawsuit was filed after HHS failed to respond to an April 1, 2020 FOIA request from the DCNF asking for communications about the coronavirus between Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deputy Director Clifford Lane and WHO officials.

“The government is now ever so slowly complying with the law and letting the American people know how they did business with the WHO and China at the outset of this pandemic,” DCNF President Neil Patel said in a statement. “We are grateful to Judicial Watch for helping us force the government to do its job.”

“These Fauci emails show how praising China was the odd priority for of WHO in the face of a novel and dangerous coronavirus” added Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That the NIH tried to slow-rolled the release of these records emails and is still sitting on thousands more is a scandal.”

A timeline released by the WHO in July shows that China did not alert the WHO to the coronavirus outbreak, though Chinese propaganda said that the country quickly reported the coronavirus outbreak to the WHO.

WHO’s initial timeline supported this claim, but the July timeline shows that WHO found out about the outbreak from the internet — rather than Chinese officials.

Though Chinese authorities misled the world about the pandemic and silenced doctors, whistleblowers, and journalists who tried to alert the public about the virus, top WHO officials repeatedly praised China’s “transparency” in handling the coronavirus outbreak.

A WHO official said in April that she suspected in December 2019 “right from the start” that the coronavirus could be spread by human-to-human transmission, but  WHO officials continued to echo denials of Chinese authorities the virus could be spread in this way.