Donald Trump has halting America’s funding to the World Health Organisation. The US President has said:

Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus. Everybody knows what’s going on there,” Trump said. “American taxpayers provided between $400 million and $500 million per year to the WHO. In contrast, China contributes $40 million a year and even less as the organization’s leading sponsor.

The United States has a duty to insist on full accountability, one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.

People need to remember that it was WHO which was telling everyone as recently as March that “stigma is more dangerous than the virus itself … stigma is the most dangerous enemy”. And this is what led to American politicians—both republican and democrat—to foolishly encourage their citizens to visit business districts and restaurants such as Chinatown to combat racism.

I’m not normally into conspiracy theories, but when Wuhan recently re-opened their Wet Markets, I thought that something smelt fishy (pun intended). But then The Australian reported that the move had also been supported by the WHO “because they are a source of livelihood and food security to many people”.

They said what…?

Surely, Andrew Hastie, the chair of the Australian parliament’s intelligence and security committee, was right when he said that the WHO’s endorsement of China’s wet markets was suspicious “after the way they handled the pandemic”. Hastie is then reported as having said:

Are we really to believe the Chinese Communist Party can’t eradicate wet markets? They can build artificial islands in the South China Sea, in the face of international opposition. Closing the wet markets should be child’s play by comparison. It’s a question of will.

In a rare instance of bipartisan support, even Labor MP Peter Kahlil – an international relations specialist with boots on the ground experience — agreed, stating:

Unless they can demonstrate that the regulations, the health and safety measures, are so strict that they can completely cut off the risk factors, they’re going to have to shut them down. It’s happened with SARS. It’s happened with avian influenza. It’s happened with COVID-19. Next time it might be an even worse virus.

COVID-19 is the wake-up call that Australia and the rest of the world needed. You cannot trust the Chinese Communist Party or WHO. Not with wet markets, nor with accurate rates of infection and mortality amongst the Chinese. But what has also become clear is that WHO is complicit in this whole tawdry affair.

Mark Powell is the Associate Pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Strathfield.

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