I woke up this morning to one of the strangest tweets ever. It was from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who tweeted:
Forgive.
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April 21, 2020
I have so two main questions: Firstly, to instruct people to forgive implies that there must have been wrong-doing. If so, what is it that they’ve actually done?
Secondly, following from this, just who exactly to WHO saying we should forgive? The Chinese Communist Party for allowing the Wuhan Virus to spread its deadly contagion to the ends of the earth? Or maybe the World Health Organisation for being complicit in the whole tawdry affair?
As Rita Panahi has persuasively argued in The Herald Sun, “WHO and China have failed the world”. The only question is, what happens now? But it wasn’t long before I received an answer to my own question. In particular, The Guardian is reporting that:
Residents of a suburban New York City county that was one of the earliest US hotspots for the coronavirus sued the World Health Organization on Monday, accusing it of gross negligence in covering up and responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a proposed class action, three residents of Westchester county accused the WHO of failing to declare a pandemic in a timely fashion, monitor China’s response to the original outbreak, provide treatment guidelines, advise members on how to respond including through travel restrictions, and coordinate a global response.
They also accused the WHO of conspiring with China’s government, which was not named as a defendant, to cover up Covid-19’s severity.
But WHO are not the only ones facing financial damages claims. Earlier in April, on Melbourne’s 3AW, Michael McLaren did an interview with Matthew Henderson, a former British diplomat in China and the Director of Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society. Henderson has co-authored a report saying:
China should be sued under international law for trillions of dollars over its initial cover-up of the coronavirus pandemic which so far has caused more than 60,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in worldwide economic damage.
The report claims that the Chinese government’s early handling of the disease and failure to adequately report information to the WHO breached Articles Six and Seven of the International Health Regulations [IHRs], a Treaty to which China is a signatory and legally obliged to uphold.
These breaches allowed the outbreak to rapidly spread outside Wuhan, its place of origin.
No wonder WHO is telling everyone to be forgiving. The Wuhan Virus—which the Director-General of WHO succeeded in re-naming as COVID-19—has caused immeasurable human suffering and trillions of dollars of damage to economies around the world.
WHO might be telling people to forgive. Because the alternative would be more destructive to WHO and the CCP than any pathogen known to man.
