Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) on Thursday called on World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to resign, accusing him of helping cover up the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of COVID-19 numbers.
Chinese officials admitted this week they weren’t counting asymptomatic patients and internal documents obtained by The Epoch Times show they took a number of steps in recent months to hide deaths and infections from the world.
“I’ve never trusted a communist. And their cover-up of this virus that originated with them has caused unnecessary deaths around America and the world,” McSally said during an appearance on Fox Business on Thursday.
“The WHO needs to stop covering for them. I think Dr. Tedros needs to step down. We need to take some action to address this issue. It’s just irresponsible, it’s unconscionable what they have done here while we have people dying across the globe.”
McSally’s colleague, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), called earlier this week for a congressional investigation into whether WHO helped the Chinese Communist Party hide the true extent of the outbreak in China.
“We know Communist China is lying about how many cases and deaths they have, what they knew and when they knew it—and the WHO never bothered to investigate further. Their inaction cost lives.”
In a statement, WHO spokeswoman Carla Drysdale said that the organization “expects all its Member States to report data in a timely and accurate manner under the international protocols that have been agreed by the Member States of WHO.”
“Membership in WHO and signing up to the International Health Regulations both carry with it the responsibility to prioritize public health, nationally and internationally, not only because global health norms say so, but because the two are inextricably linked, as this global pandemic has made clear to the world,” she said in an email.
She pointed to WHO official Dr. Mike Ryan telling reporters this week that people should be “very careful” not to “be profiling certain parts of the world as being uncooperative or nontransparent.”
“Sometimes we attribute a lack of transparency to what are natural limitations in our response,” he said. “We need to show a little bit more balance.”
WHO officials have repeatedly promoted a narrative similar to the Chinese regime, claiming China bought the world time to respond to the pandemic when officials actually covered up details about the outbreak.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has hit Chinese officials for spreading disinformation, such as the unfounded allegation that the U.S. military introduced the CCP virus in Wuhan, China, while national security adviser Robert O'Brien asserted that Chinese officials covering up the initial outbreak of the virus cost the world some two months in response time.
“I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that we see what happened to Italy, what happened to Spain,” Dr. Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told reporters in Washington.
