Joe Biden is naming his coronavirus task force in anticipation of his likely election victory. But his first big test in handling the coronavirus will come on the global stage: how he handles the World Health Organization.
Biden’s naive worldview that it’s leaderlike to give millions in taxpayer dollars to people who demonize the United States while propping up authoritarians inspired his July announcement that he would rejoin the WHO on the first day of his presidency. President Trump rightly froze all remaining U.S. payments to the body after it chose to parrot Chinese Communist Party propaganda rather than actually address the global pandemic.
The WHO admitted that China did not report the existence of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, but that didn’t stop them from parroting the CCP’s finding that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the virus.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China??. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
While China was silencing whistleblowers and selling countries faulty medical equipment, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was praising them. While Taiwan was warning of the dangers of the virus, the WHO ignored its existence as part of a policy of placating China. Tedros, known for slavishly praising dictators such as Xi Jinping and Robert Mugabe, criticized the U.S. and other countries for closing their borders to foreigners traveling from China.
This is what $3.5 billion since 2010 has bought the U.S. Annually, the U.S. has been the largest contributor to the WHO’s budget. Now, Biden plans to resume paying the organization to lie to the world about infectious diseases because that is how we “restore our leadership on the world stage.”
It’s been clear since the start of the pandemic that the Democratic Party was going to let China get away with allowing the virus to spread across the world. The constant invocation of how many Americans were killed by the virus was always insincere, a tool to defeat Republicans in an election year while promoting bailouts for poorly run states. Biden’s desire to return to the status quo only confirms this.
The U.S. should not even entertain rejoining the WHO without a top-to-bottom overhaul of the organization. Even then, it is likely unsalvageable, as with most U.N. organizations. We would be better served if Biden opted to shovel taxpayer dollars into a furnace. That Biden doesn’t recognize this shows how ill equipped he is to handle the pandemic.
