The Secretary of State for the United States, Mike Pompeo, reportedly said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “bought” the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), adding that the Tedros’s leadership has resulted in “dead Britons” during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Mr Pompeo is said to have made the accusations against WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a meeting with a bipartisan group of British MPs from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China during his visit to London on Monday.
The Secretary of State said that the United States had a “firm intelligence foundation” to make the claim that the Chinese “bought” Tedros, per multiple sources quoted by The Times.
According to The Telegraph, Mr Pompeo also compared the World Health Organization to the United Nations Human Rights Council, saying that the international body is a “political, not a science-based organisation”.
Mr Pompeo reportedly said that “when push came to shove, when it really mattered most”, people had died “because of the deal that was made”, referring to the alleged collusion between the CCP and the WHO, which he claimed resulted in “dead Britons” from their failures to contain the Wuhan-born virus.
The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is a member of a Marxist-Leninist Ethiopian party. When he served as the foreign minister of the country, he organised partnerships with the Chinese Communist Party under Beijing’s debt trap diplomatic programme, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which saw Ethiopian debt to China massively increase.
The Marxist’s ascension to become the head of the World Health Organization was backed by China, despite him not being a medical doctor, a first in the organisation’s history.
A report from the German newspaper Der Spiegel claimed that the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping, personally called Tedros, demanding that the WHO delay declaring the Wuhan virus a pandemic, as well as discouraging him from telling the world that about person-to-person transmission of the virus.
Tedros finally declared that the Chinese coronavirus was a pandemic on March 11th — months after the initial outbreak — just one day after Xi Jinping visited Wuhan for the first time since the beginning of the epidemic.
According to Johns Hopkins University, to date, some 45,507 British people have died as a result of the Chinese coronavirus.
The WHO denied the conversation between Tedros and Xi took place.
During his meeting with MPs in London, Mr Pompeo also revealed that the United States government had shared intelligence on Chinese officials that are said to be involved in the mass internment of Uighur Muslims in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Mr Pompeo said that “the intelligence has now been shared. All but a little bit was Five Eyes”, in reference to the intelligence alliance that is comprised of the UK, the U.S., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
The move by the U.S. to provide evidence of the humanitarian crisis committed by the communist party is seen as an effort to increase pressure on the UK to speed up imposing sanctions on Chinese officials. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has suggested that it may take months to build the evidentiary basis to impose sanctions.
The leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, has called on the government to introduce Magnitsky-style sanctions on communist officials, over the “deeply disturbing” actions taken by the regime in Beijing to repress the Uighur population of Xinjiang.
In May 2019, the Pentagon said that it believes there has been a massive increase in the number of mostly Muslim people interned in “concentration camps” in Xinjiang, tripling over the previous year to as many as three million people.
Alongside the Uighur people, the Chinese state is believed to have imprisoned other ethnic minorities in the region, such as the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims, as well as some Christians.
Former victims of the Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang have reported that they were subjected to forced sterilisation, torture, rape, and organ harvesting.
Mr Pompeo urged the United Kingdom and other Western nations to form an alliance to pressure the Chinese state, saying in a press conference: “We have seen Hong Kong’s freedoms crushed [and] watched the Chinese Communist Party bully its neighbours.”
Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZidulka
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