House Foreign Affairs Report Blames China and WHO for Cover-Up, Mishandling COVID Pandemic

Sept. 22, 2020 (EIRNS)—In a report issued yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Rep. Elliot Engel (D-NY), accused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organization’s Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of covering up and mishandling the coronavirus pandemic, thus causing its global spread and economic devastation that otherwise, they claim, could have been prevented.

Entitled, “The Origins of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, Including the Roles of the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization,” the 96-page report was presented officially yesterday by ranking Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, who also chairs the China Task Force, which “works to find and address the most serious threats posed to the United States by the Chinese Communist Party,” according to the Committee’s press release.

That release makes clear that the report is nothing but a compilation of unsubstantiated accusations and half-truths made over the past several months by the same group of neocon China-bashers inhabiting the Congress, other government agencies, affiliated think tanks and sections of the White House—aimed at sabotaging any real collaboration between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on this and other crucial world matters.

“As we continued our investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, we uncovered even more disturbing evidence about the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and WHO Director General Dr. Tedros’s gross mishandling of the virus that allowed it to turn into a deadly pandemic,” said McCaul. Had the CCP been “transparent,” he added, and had Dr. Tedros “cared more about global health than appeasing the CCP, lives could have been spared and widespread economic devastation could have been mitigated.” Revealing the truth “is the first step,” he warned. Now, “we must hold both the CCP and WHO Director General Tedros accountable for the suffering they have allowed the world to endure.” The report makes several recommendations, including that Dr. Tedros resign, as he made sure that the WHO was “complicit in the spread and normalization of CCP propaganda and disinformation.” It demands that Taiwan be readmitted to the WHO as an observer, as its presence will ensure “that future warnings about potential health and emergencies do not go unheeded.”