When I first started becoming politically aware in the (very) early ’80s, one of the first things I decided was that, Jeane Kirkpatrick notwithstanding, the United Nations needed to go.
Go where? It didn’t really matter. Maybe to a neutral nation like Switzerland, or better yet, just push the damn ugly building and all the corruptocrats inside it into the East River.
But, I figured, we should keep the non-political, good-works organizations like UNICEF and the World Health Organization.
The last year disabused me of any notion that WHO wasn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party.
Next, I guess we’ll find out that UNICEF has trafficking kids for the mob, but I certainly hope not.
In case you hadn’t guessed, WHO is involved in yet another scandal, this time concerning our Italian friends.
Italian prosecutors are going after a senior WHO official for “lying to them about a spiked WHO report into Italy’s coronavirus response,” according to a new report from the Associated Press. The Italian officials have revealed private communications that are “likely to embarrass” the UN’s health agency, as the AP puts it.
Here’s the dirt:
Prosecutors are investigating the huge COVID-19 death toll in Bergamo and whether Italy’s lack of preparedness going into the pandemic played a role. Their probe expanded to include the spiked WHO report into Italy’s virus response, which revealed that the Italian government hadn’t updated its pandemic preparedness plan since 2006.
No one has ever accused the Italian government of competence, at least not with a straight face. Nevertheless, “WHO pulled the report from its website on May 14, a day after it went up, and never republished it.”
At a time when people needed the best possible information about a deadly pandemic that was killing Italians by the thousand, WHO apparently spiked a report critical of the Italian government in order to spare their feelings.
Prosecutors claim that former WHO assistant general director Dr. Ranieri Guerra was placed under investigation for making “false declarations” about the memory-holed report.
Guerra says the report contained “factual inaccuracies,” but that doesn’t explain why it was placed in the circular file instead of simply corrected.
This wouldn’t be the first time WHO was involved in a COVID-related cover-up, which makes the whole thing seem fishy as hell.
If you’ll recall, Northern Italy suffered more than almost any other area during the first weeks of the COVID-19 breakout starting in January 2020.
This gets to the heart of what might be the deeper scandal.
Robert Stacy McCain reported a year ago:
The size, location, and timing of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak all suggest that the disease was imported to the country directly from China. The first two cases reported in Italy were Chinese tourists who arrived in Rome in late January. Three weeks later, however, a 38-year-old man in the northern province of Lombardy showed up at a hospital with respiratory problems but had to wait 36 hours before he was tested for coronavirus, during which time “he had contact with hospital staff and visiting friends and family.” That Feb. 19 incident raises obvious question: How did a man in Lombardy get this virus? Why northern Italy and not somewhere else? Why late February? Well, it is customary for Chinese to travel home for Lunar New Year celebrations, which fell on Jan. 24 this year, and the incubation period for coronavirus is about two weeks. How many of the Chinese workers in northern Italy traveled to China in late January and returned to Italy — without symptoms but already infected with COVID-19 — in early February?
It could very well be that Italy’s response to the pandemic wasn’t just bungled, but initially might have been muted by the government’s need to maintain profitable economic ties with the Chinese Communist government in Beijing.
If there had been any indication of that in the spiked WHO report, it could do much worse than mere embarrass Rome.
That last part is pure conjecture on my part, but given all that we know for certain, it certainly doesn’t seem like wild speculation.
More to come, you can be sure.
