Coronovirus international politics #1

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The Crimes of Tedros Adhanom

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as well as being the first WHO director without a medical degree, also has a somewhat political background compared to his predecessors. On his online biography, the WHO lays out his qualifications as Ethiopian Minister of Health from 2002 to 2012, impressive stuff.

Aside from his medical credentials, Tedros happens to be a member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which is an organisation about as peaceful as its name suggests. Founded as a communist revolutionary party that came to power in 1991, it led a guerrilla campaign against the Mengistu dictatorship and formed a coalition with two other ethnic parties after his exile.

Over time, the TPLF began to exert more and more influence over the other two parties. Most military generals and key leaders within the government are Tigray, including the Prime Minister who ruled the country for 21 years before his death. The Tigray represent only 6% of the population of Ethiopia, one of the major ethnic groups are the Amhara who mostly made up the Mengistu regime.

Favourable treatment under Megistu created a lot of resentment towards the Amhara from other ethnic groups like for example the Oromo. Tedros himself hails from the Tigray region and was a senior member of the party and became involved with the TPLF after the removal of Mengistu. The same party that in its 1968 manifesto called the Amhrara people its ‘eternal enemy’. Just how senior was Tedros? Well this Ethiopian newspaper listed him as the 3rd most important member of the politbureau standing committee, which gives the impression he was more important than a simple medical administrator.

The TPLF was listed as a terrorist organisation by the US government in the 1990s, and is still listed as one by the Global Terror Database because of its unfortunate habit of carrying out armed assaults in rural areas.

The Amhara people have reported systematic discrimination and human rights abuses by the current government. Humans Rights Watch in 2010 wrote a report on how aid in the form of food and fertiliser was withheld from local Amhara villagers because of their affiliations with the opposition party. Other forms of aid denial involved the refusal of emergency healthcare by ministry of health workers; the same ministry which was at the time being led by one Tedros Adhanom.

The Amhara People’s Union, an activist group based in Washington, has issued many other accusations of human rights abuses against the TPLF led government, including noting that the birth rates in the Amhara region was far lower than those experienced in other regions. They noted at a session in Ethiopian parliament that, around 2 million Amhara were found to have “disappeared” from the population census.

Not content with denying aid to political dissidents, Tedros was also health minister at a time when the regime was accused of covering up epidemics. A cholera outbreak spread the region in 2007, infecting thousands in neighbouring countries. When it spread to Ethiopia, the government simply renamed the outbreak and called it Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD). International organisations were pressured not to call it Cholera (despite the UN testing the infected and finding Cholera), and were pressured by government employees not to reveal the number of infected. Another stunning victory for the health minister.

The deadly famine which struck Ethiopia in the 1980s forever associated the country with the word, but it’s not entirely a thing of the past. The WHO itself after pages of gushing reports on how well Ethiopia’s health sector was doing, admitted in 2016 that at least 8.6 million people still needed food aid to survive, and that the situation had not improved at all for at least four years. So at the end of Tedros’ illustrious term in office he could boast a mere remaining 8% of the population who would be left to starve to death without foreign aid.

But after his shining accomplishments in health, Tedros had bigger fish to fry. In 2012 he was appointed foreign minister and there quickly followed a crackdown on journalists and government opponents in the country, and an attempt to extradite those who had fled to Yemen in exile. The two countries entered negotiations to track down and deport dissidents from Yemen and imprison them in Ethiopia. Tedros himself led these negotiations, there’s even a nice picture of the medical man during the talks with the Yemeni foreign minister.

One such case was a British citizen Andy Tsege who was arrested at Sana’a airport and twice given a death sentence in Ethiopia. This led to the involvement of the British government who threatened denial of aid to Ethiopia unless he be granted asylum. Tedros responded that Tsege was “being treated very well. He even has a laptop, have you ever heard of a political prisoner with a laptop?” Andy of course, after his return to the UK told a somewhat different story of being tortured for days on end, alongside dozens of other prisoners.

One of the reasons perhaps that Tedros’ qualifications as foreign minister is absent from some of his online CVs, may be because of the mass protests that engulfed the country in 2016. The Ethiopian government a few years earlier had unveiled a plan to seize 1000 square miles of land to be requisitioned for investment. This also involved the forced relocation of 15000 people in the Oromia region, which the government said was good because where they lived they currently “lacked infrastructure”.

But the ingrates somehow didn’t appreciate this massive favour that the government was doing them, and mass protests broke out during a cultural celebration in 2016. The police responded at first with tear gas, and then later, with mass shootings. The violence and resulting stampede killed an estimated 500 people according to Human Rights Watch. The government then issued a state of emergency, arresting an estimated 70,000 people, and forced dozens of opposition journalists into exile.

Tedros himself got into a public spat with Human Rights Watch after their presentation, firstly denying that the numbers were as high as they were, and then claiming that the police were unarmed, here’s a video of the police at the event. Being no expert myself I assume that Ethiopia must have found a way to develop assault-rifle shaped crowd control devices that are entirely non-lethal, truly miraculous stuff from the Foreign Ministry.

And so this is the noble figure that ascended to the role of director of the WHO in 2017. Not one to miss a chance to defend mass murderers, he previously argued against the ICC trial of Uhuru Kenyatta under whose government 1,300 had been killed after rigged elections. Not surprising then, that one of the first things Tedros did after taking the job, was to nominate Robert Mugabe – thankfully now dead - as goodwill ambassador to the WHO; A man who ordered the killings of 20,000 people in Zimbabwe during the 1980s.

Tedros of course takes every chance he can to praise the good governance of China, and given the human rights record of the People’s Republic, it’s no wonder he likes them so much. From projects like media propaganda centres, mass relocations, and social credit style score cards, Ethiopia’s governance in many ways resembles a carbon copy of the Chinese authoritarian model. Complete with a one party state and focus on profit over human rights.

Ethiopia , until very recently, remained one of the world’s worst human rights violators, receiving a score of 19 out of 100 on the human freedom index for 2018, and a score of 150 out of 180 for freedom of the press. The government has remained in power since the takeover in 1991, and was seemingly so popular that it won more than one election by 100% of the vote.

So how did a man with a record like Tedros become director of the WHO? It’s quite simple really, the WHO has been riddled with scandal after scandal for some time now. Facing almost no rise in budgets during the 1990s, the WHO turned towards the corporate sector for additional funding, and by 2008, corporate donations made up 80% of the organisation’s budget.

According to health researcher Soniah Shah, the role that large drug companies played in shaping global health policy created a serious conflict of interest on the one hand to improve the companies’ public image, but on the other to protect their financial interests. This led to cases like lobbying to weaken patent laws for new drugs in India, and blocking laws in South Africa that attempted to make HIV treatment more accessible.

The serious misallocation of funds by the organization was made most apparent in 2016 when it was found that the WHO spent $200 million a year on travel expenses, not even including those paid for by the host country. Another absolutely damning report issued by the Associated Press, reported that WHO employees working to relieve the Cholera epidemic in Yemen had actually siphoned off the funds for officials. Some of these workers were later not even removed from their jobs.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation played a large role in promoting Tedros. After their large investments into healthcare programs in Ethiopia which Tedros had facilitated, the foundation was keen to promote similar programs on a global level and donated billions to the WHO towards this end.

The appointment of someone as deeply unqualified as Tedros owes much to the labyrinthine structure of the WHO’s appointment process. The director is selected by the executive board, who are in turn appointed by a rotating minority of the World Health Assembly who are made up of health ministers appointed by world governments. The WHO therefore has the same problem as many other global institutions, that its director is an appointee of an appointee of an appointee of someone who may have been elected legitimately. So by the time you get to the director, the democratic mandate has been so thinly stretched as to be almost meaningless.

The media of course portrayed Tedros as a saintly figure on a moral mission to cure the world of deadly diseases. A twitter campaign slogan ran with “it’s time for an African to lead the WHO”. Indeed, one only wishes it hadn’t been an African in a regime that had spent the last few years killing and resettling more Africans than almost any other.

Some outlets have pointed out that the director general has little power over actual policy in the WHO, this misses the point that the organization is accepted as a global authority on matters of health, and advises world governments. The mismanagement of the WHO through people like Tedros has totally exacerbated the global coronavirus pandemic. Not only did Tedros find every opportunity to praise the CCP’s handling of the crisis even as doctors were being arrested and people welded inside their homes; he also gave completely contradictory advice. First saying that countries should not restrict travel to and from China so as not to be discriminatory, and then chiding them for not doing enough to prepare. The virus was only named a pandemic a few days ago at the time of writing, after infecting 140 countries which is 70 more than it took for Swine flu to be declared a pandemic.

If there was ever an example of the failure of globalised institutions, the WHO is it. I’m not here to say that the organisation has not done any good in the world, but the sheer scale of its mismanagement means that it’s advice should not carry anywhere near the weight that it does. Instead of advising tech companies on how to censor information, it should be radically reformed or simply disbanded.

In a sane world, instead of leading a global organisation, Tedros and his cronies would be put on trial at the International Criminal Court, tried for his crimes, and if found guilty, should spend the rest of his life in prison.

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SkyNewsAust twitterde op vrijdag 03-04-2020 om 10:45:18 Outsiders host Rowan Dean says Australia should be pulling out of the World Health Organisation “tomorrow” as it has been “actively working against our interests and as a propaganda arm for the Chinese”.

https://t.co/Hyn2hiTpMt reageer retweet

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Rntk____ twitterde op donderdag 02-04-2020 om 04:16:23 WATCH: Japanese Deputy Prime Minister explain how the Chinese Communist government covered up the Wuhan #COVIDー19 epidemic, endangering millions. Says the World Health Organization should be renamed the “China Health Organization” bc they parrot CCP propaganda. https://t.co/rMaatXPBEq reageer retweet

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bennyjohnson twitterde op zaterdag 04-04-2020 om 00:39:51 Dr. Deborah Birx: "I will remind you that on February 3rd the head of the @WHO said there was no reason to ever do a Travel Ban. You know, it wasn't until January 14th that we knew there was Human-to-Human Transmission."

https://t.co/UbuWKzmd4J reageer retweet

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chuckwoolery twitterde op zaterdag 04-04-2020 om 06:30:50 Arizona's McSally Calls for 'Communist' Director of World Health Organization to Step Down https://t.co/M4UGOdXRwp https://t.co/QTy2g7r7yu reageer retweet

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DailyCaller twitterde op zaterdag 04-04-2020 om 00:41:20 Jim Acosta interrupts Dr. Birx as she criticizes the WHO’s response to coronavirus
https://t.co/PAcqG9sW4K reageer retweet

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The CIA Is Trying To Find China’s Real Coronavirus Data

The CIA is looking into China’s coronavirus data to find the real numbers after the U.S. intelligence community reportedly concluded Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime had falsified the data.

The CIA believes the Chinese government does not know the true number of cases or deaths in the country, and has instead lied about the data, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The news comes as China touts a supposed drop in number of new cases in the country. China’s official death tally for the city of Wuhan has also been called into question.

“There’s no way to confirm any of those numbers,” National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien told NYT. “There’s lots of public reporting on whether the numbers are too low.”

President Donald Trump has been hesitant to attack China on the issue, however. He declined to say whether China’s numbers should be believed at a Wednesday press briefing despite the intelligence community’s conclusions being reported earlier that day.

U.S. politicians have also called for punishments on China and even the World Health Organization, which has parroted propaganda from the Chinese government throughout the pandemic.

Wuhan, where the virus first broke out, officially reported 2,500 deaths. But over the course of two days during the crisis, just one of the city’s eight mortuaries received shipments of 5,000 urns to carry ashes of the deceased, according to Shanghaiist.

The mortuary plans to release urns at a rate of 500 per day until April 4. If the city’s seven other mortuaries are adopting the same policy, that would total 40,000 urns, starting with the first confirmed delivery on March 26.

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DailyCaller twitterde op vrijdag 03-04-2020 om 00:51:22 Peter Navarro:

“One of the things that this crisis has taught us, sir, is that we are dangerously over dependent on a global supply chain.. Never again should we depend on the rest of the world for essential medicines and countermeasures.”
https://t.co/VkVq8XfFsP reageer retweet

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Fact check: Did the Obama administration deplete the federal stockpile of N95 masks?

The claim: The Obama administration used and did not replenish the nation’s emergency stockpile of medical supplies, including N95 masks

As the novel coronavirus pandemic strains health care systems, questions around the U.S. government's response have circulated in the media and online.

On March 26, The Daily Wire published an article centering on the Obama administration’s role in using and allegedly failing to replenish the federal stockpile.

“The Obama administration significantly depleted the federal stockpile of N95 respirator masks to deal with the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009 and never rebuilt the stockpile despite calls to do so,” the piece begins.

USA TODAY investigation:US never spent enough on emergency stockpile, former managers say

The article draws from the reporting of outlets including Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times. According to Bloomberg News, “after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”

“After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks, which filter out airborne particles, be replenished by the stockpile,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said during a press conference the country’s stockpile of personal protective equipment, including medical gear like N95 masks, is almost depleted.

A history of the national emergency stockpile

Established in 1999 to prepare the country for threats like pandemics, natural disasters and acts of bioterrorism, the United States has used and maintained its Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies during times of acute crisis in the health care system.

The reserve was originally named the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile, but was renamed during a 2003 restructuring when additional materials were added to the supply. The stockpile is jointly managed by the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services.

While officials rarely discuss specifics about the reserve, like the exact locations and value of its contents, the fund's restocking contracts are largely public, including [url=https://investors.emergentbiosolutions.com/news-releases/news-release-details/emergent-biosolutions-announces-exercise-barda-first-contract?field_nir_news_date_value[min]=]a July 2019 deal[/url] for vaccines valued at $1.5 billion.

Warnings about the United States' lack of preparedness for a serious pandemic have come from both inside the federal government and elsewhere since at least the early 2000s.

Fact check:Did Bill Gates predict the coronavirus in 2015?

“SARS has infected relatively few people nationwide, but it has raised concerns about preparedness for large-scale infectious disease outbreaks,” a 2003 analysis from the Government Accountability Office reads.

Fact check: A Bill Gates-backed pandemic simulation in October did not predict COVID-19

The stockpile has been used at least 13 times since its creation, including during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and 2001 anthrax attacks. Also during the George W. Bush administration, the national stockpile was deployed in response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and then again for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, according to the stockpile's history published by the HHS.

In 2005, the Bush administration published a report that urged investment in local and national stockpiles, increasing domestic production capacity and coordinating research efforts toward cures and vaccines. In 2006, Congress approved expanding the stockpile to include protective gear like N95 surgical masks.

During the presidency of Barack Obama, the national stockpile was seriously taxed as the administration addressed multiple crises over eight years. About "75 percent of N95 respirators and 25 percent of face masks contained in the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile (∼100 million products) were deployed for use in health care settings over the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response," according to a 2017 study in the journal Health Security.

Again according to NIH, the stockpile's resources were also used during hurricanes Alex, Irene, Isaac and Sandy. Flooding in 2010 in North Dakota also called for stockpile funds to be deployed. The 2014 outbreaks of the ebola virus and botulism, as well as the 2016 outbreak of the zika virus, continued to significantly tax the stockpile with no serious effort from the Obama administration to replenish the fund.

ProPublica reported on April 3 that congressional budget battles in the early years of the Obama administration contributed to stockpile shortages. "Among the victims of those partisan fights was the effort to keep adequate supplies of masks, ventilators, pharmaceuticals and other medical equipment on hand to respond to a public health crisis. Lawmakers in both parties raised the specter of shortchanging future disaster response even as they voted to approve the cuts," the article states.

During the presidency of Donald Trump, analysts have warned the United States is not prepared for a serious pandemic.

'Gross misjudment': Experts say Trump's decision to disband pandemic team hindered coronavirus response

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” the 2019 World Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence states.

The Trump administration has not taken significant steps to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile.

Our rating: True

We rate this claim TRUE because it is supported by our research. There is no indication that the Obama administration took significant steps to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile after it was depleted from repeated crises during Obama’s tenure. Calls for action came from experts at the time concerned for the country’s ability to respond to future serious pandemics. Such recommendations were, for whatever reason, not heeded.

Our fact-check sources:


• Department of Health and Human Services, Strategic National Stockpile: History
• Government Accountability Office, 2003 Report on Public Health Capacity
• Health Security, Personal Protective Equipment Supply Chain: Lessons Learned from Recent Public Health Emergency Responses
• Homeland Security Council, 2005 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza
• National Institute of Health, The Strategic National Stockpile: Origin, Policy Foundations, and Federal Context
• 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community

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Op zaterdag 4 april 2020 20:24 schreef DireStraits7 het volgende:

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DailyCaller twitterde op zaterdag 04-04-2020 om 00:41:20 Jim Acosta interrupts Dr. Birx as she criticizes the WHO’s response to coronavirus
https://t.co/PAcqG9sW4K reageer retweet

Deze tweet die je aanhaalt is overigens wel mooi. Het WHO keihard aanpakken op eerdere uitspraken, maar Trump mag niet gewezen worden op zijn uitspraken. Typisch weer.

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Op zaterdag 4 april 2020 20:20 schreef DireStraits7 het volgende:

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Mooi collectie bijeengeraapte quotes. Ik heb even een willekeurige link aangeklikt:
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Op zaterdag 4 april 2020 22:42 schreef DireStraits7 het volgende:

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Aan Trump's eigen etiquettes.

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Op zaterdag 4 april 2020 23:06 schreef DireStraits7 het volgende:

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Waar heb je het allemaal over? In dat filmpje in die tweet blijkt duidelijk dat Trump niet gediend is van een vraag over zijn opmerking(en) dat Amerika niet in een crisis zou belanden. Dat vind ik nogal een hard gelag als ze blijkbaar wel de WHO aanvallen op eerder gedane uitspraken.

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Op zaterdag 4 april 2020 23:09 schreef DireStraits7 het volgende:

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Hij wordt toch afgekapt, of niet?

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Op zaterdag 4 april 2020 23:12 schreef DireStraits7 het volgende:

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Ja, omdat ze in het Witte Huis doen alsof ze boter op hun hoofd hebben.