Trump’s
letter to Tedros Trump 20200519
Dear Dr. Tedros:
On April 14, 2020, I suspended United States contributions to the World
Health Organization pending an investigation by my Administration of the
organization’s failed response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This review has confirmed many of the serious
concerns I raised last month and identified others that the World Health
Organization should have addressed, especially the
World Health Organization’s alarming lack of independence from the People’s
Republic of China. Based on this
review, we now know the following:
•The World Health Organization consistently
ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early
December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical
journal. The World Health Organization failed to independently investigate credible reports that
conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts,
even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself.
• By no later than December 30, 2019, the
World Health Organization office in Beijing knew that there was a “major
public health” concern in Wuhan. Between
December 26 and December 30, China’s media highlighted evidence of a new virus
emerging from Wuhan, based on patient data sent to multiple Chinese genomics
companies. Additionally, during this
period, Dr. Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated
Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that a new
coronavirus was causing a novel disease that was, at the time, afflicting
approximately 180 patients.
• By the next day, Taiwanese authorities had
communicated information to the World Health Organization indicating
human-to-human transmission of a new virus. Yet the World Health Organization chose not to
share any of this critical information with the rest of the world, probably for
political reasons.
• The International Health Regulations
require countries to report the risk of a health emergency within 24 hours. But China did not inform the World Health
Organization of Wuhan’s several cases of pneumonia, of unknown origin, until
December 31, 2019, even though it likely had knowledge of these cases days or
weeks earlier.
• According to Dr. Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinic
Center, he told Chinese authorities on January 5,
2020, that he had sequenced the genome of the virus.
There was no publication of this
information until six days later, on January 11,
2020, when Dr. Zhang self-posted it online. The next day,
Chinese authorities closed his lab for “rectification.” As even the World Health Organization
acknowledged, Dr. Zhang’s posting was a great act of “transparency.” But the World Health Organization has been
conspicuously silent both with respect to the closure of Dr. Zhang’s lab and
his assertion that he had notified Chinese authorities of his breakthrough six
days earlier.
• The World Health Organization has repeatedly
made claims about the coronavirus that were either
grossly inaccurate or misleading.
- On January 14, 2020, the World
Health Organization gratuitously reaffirmed
China’s now-debunked claim that the coronavirus could not be transmitted
between humans, stating: “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.” This assertion was
in direct conflict with censored reports from Wuhan.
- On January 21, 2020, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured
you not to declare the coronavirus outbreak an emergency. You gave in to this
pressure the next day and told the world that the
coronavirus did not pose a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Just over one week later, on January 30,
2020, overwhelming evidence to the contrary forced you to reverse course.
- On January 28, 2020, after meeting with
President Xi in Beijing, you praised the Chinese government for its “transparency” with respect to the coronavirus,
announcing that China had set a “new standard for outbreak control” and “bought the world time.” You did not
mention that China had, by then, silenced or punished several doctors for
speaking out about the virus and restricted Chinese institutions from
publishing information about it.
• Even after you belatedly declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency
of International Concern on January 30, 2020, you failed to press China for the
timely admittance of a World Health Organization team of international medical
experts. As a result, this critical team
did not arrive in China until two weeks later, on February 16, 2020. And even then, the team was not allowed to
visit Wuhan until the final days of their visit. Remarkably, the
World Health Organization was silent when China denied the two American members
of the team access to Wuhan entirely.
• You also strongly praised China’s strict domestic travel restrictions,
but were inexplicably against my closing of the United States border, or the
ban, with respect to people coming from China. I put the ban in place regardless of your
wishes. Your
political gamesmanship on this issue was deadly, as other governments,
relying on your comments, delayed imposing
life-saving restrictions on travel to and from China. Incredibly, on February 3, 2020, you
reinforced your position, opining that because China was doing such a great job
protecting the world from the virus, travel restrictions were “causing more
harm than good.” Yet by then the world
knew that, before locking down Wuhan, Chinese
authorities had allowed more than five million people to leave the city and
that many of these people were bound for international destinations all over
the world.
• As of February 3, 2020, China was strongly pressuring countries to lift
or forestall travel restrictions. This
pressure campaign was bolstered by your incorrect statements on that day
telling the world that the spread of the virus outside of China was “minimal and slow” and that “the chances of getting
this going to anywhere outside China [were] very
low.”
• On March 3, 2020, the World Health Organization
cited official Chinese data to downplay the very serious risk of asymptomatic
spread, telling the world that “COVID-19 does not transmit as
efficiently as influenza” and that unlike influenza this disease was not
primarily driven by “people who are infected but not yet sick.” China’s evidence,
the World Health Organization told the world, “showed that only one percent of
reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms
within two days.” Many experts, however,
citing data from Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere, vigorously questioned these
assertions. It is now clear that China’s assertions, repeated to the world by the World
Health Organization, were wildly inaccurate.
• By the time you finally declared the virus
a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it had killed more than 4,000 people and
infected more than 100,000 people in at least 114 countries around the world.
• On April 11, 2020, several African Ambassadors wrote to the Chinese
Foreign Ministry about the discriminatory
treatment of Africans related to the pandemic in Guangzhou and other cities in
China. You were aware that Chinese
authorities were carrying out a campaign of forced quarantines, evictions, and
refusal of services against the nationals of these countries. You have not
commented on China’s racially discriminatory actions. You have, however, baselessly labeled as
racist Taiwan’s well-founded complaints about your mishandling of this
pandemic.
• Throughout this crisis, the World
Health Organization has been curiously insistent
on praising China for its alleged
“transparency.” You have
consistently joined in these tributes, notwithstanding that China has been
anything but transparent. In early
January, for example, China ordered samples of the virus to be destroyed,
depriving the world of critical information. Even now, China
continues to undermine the International Health Regulations by refusing to
share accurate and timely data, viral samples and isolates, and by withholding
vital information about the virus and its origins. And, to this
day, China continues to deny international access to their scientists and
relevant facilities, all while casting blame widely and recklessly and
censoring its own experts.
• The World Health Organization has failed to
publicly call on China to allow for an independent investigation into the
origins of the virus, despite the recent endorsement for doing so by its
own Emergency Committee. The World
Health Organization’s failure to do so has
prompted World Health Organization member states to adopt the “COVID-19 Response” Resolution at this year’s
World Health Assembly, which echoes the call by the United States and so many
others for an impartial, independent, and comprehensive review of how the World
Health Organization handled the crisis. The
resolution also calls for an investigation into the origins of the virus, which
is necessary for the world to understand how best to counter the disease.
Perhaps worse than all these failings is that we know that the World
Health Organization could have done so much better.
Just a few
years ago, under the direction of a different Director-General, the
World Health Organization showed the world how much it has to offer. In 2003, in
response to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China, Director-General Harlem Brundtland boldly declared the World
Health Organization’s first emergency travel
advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the
disease epicenter in southern China. She
also did not hesitate to criticize China for
endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its
usual playbook of arresting whistleblowers and censoring media. Many lives
could have been saved had you followed Dr. Brundtland’s example.
It is clear the repeated missteps by you
and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been
extremely costly for the world. The only
way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate
independence from China. My Administration has already started discussions with
you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste. That is why it is my duty, as President of the
United States, to inform you that, if the World Health Organization does not commit to major
substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary
freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and
reconsider our membership in the organization. I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to
continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly
not serving America’s interests.
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