When the world begins to recover from this coronavirus chaos, there sure are going to be a whole lot of fingers pointed in the general direction of China.
After all, it was at a wet market in Wuhan where all this hullabaloo got started, and China seemed to be silencing whistleblowers and downplaying the threat that the virus posed pretty regularly.
And, now that the rest of the world has gotten a close, personal look at what the virus can do, much of China’s disseminated data appears to be completely FUBAR. Whether this data manipulation was negligent or nefarious remains to be seen, but we do know that the World Health Organization signed off on it.
That’s apparently where President Trump draws the line.
President Trump announced at the White House coronavirus news briefing in the Rose Garden on Tuesday that the United States will immediately halt all funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), saying it had put “political correctness over lifesaving measures.”
Also at the briefing, the president said plans to ease the national economic shutdown were being finalized, and that he would be “authorizing governors to reopen their states to reopen as they see fit.” At the same time, Trump made clear that he was not going to put “any pressure” on governors to reopen.
Trump read a long list of names of people in business, health care and sports who will advise him on how to restart the economy. “We have to get our sports back,” Trump remarked. “I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old.”
The news comes just hours after a leaked transmission from inside the State Department revealed that the US had been concerned about a laboratory just miles from Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. The lab specialized in highly contagious, bat-born coronavirus strains and had seemingly inadequate safety and security resources.
That transmission occurred over two years ago.
