Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks to the media after the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on Ebola in Congo, in Geneva, Switzerland, Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018. The World Health Organization says it is “deeply concerned” by the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Congo but the situation does not yet warrant being declared a global emergency. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

If you’re wondering why the World Health Organization has, from the very beginning, been seemingly covering for China, we may have some answers now.

Peter Hasson over at The Daily Caller has a new piece out detailing how WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gained his position. You’ll be not-so-surprised to learn that direct backing from China in 2017 played a major factor.

WHO Director-General @DrTedros won his job in a 2017 election with China's backing.

Now he and the WHO are playing a crucial role in China's propaganda campaign https://t.co/jzq98IdVbd

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) March 23, 2020

He worked closely with China during his time as Ethiopia’s health minister, and China backed Tedros’s 2017 bid for WHO director-general, media outlets noted at the time.

Tedros won the election despite widely covered accusations that he covered up three different cholera epidemics as health minister in Ethiopia. Though he goes by “Dr. Tedros,” the WHO chief isn’t a medical doctor but has a PhD in public health.

Just months after taking over at the WHO, Tedros tapped former Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, a notorious human rights violator, to be a UN Goodwill ambassador and only backed down after an international outcry.

As Hasson notes, the attempt to appoint someone as vile as Mugabe was an attempt to pay back China for getting him elected.

“Diplomats said [Mugabe’s] appointment was a political payoff from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — the WHO’s first African director-general — to China, a long-time ally of Mugabe, and the 50 or so African states that helped to secure Tedros’s election earlier this year,” Sunday Times columnist Rebecca Myers wrote in October 2017.

“Chinese diplomats had campaigned hard for the Ethiopian, using Beijing’s financial clout and opaque aid budget to build support for him among developing countries,” she added.

This makes everything much clearer. As I reported last week, Tedros has been parroting Chinese propaganda from the very beginning. In mid-January, despite the obvious indications that Wuhan virus was highly contagious, the WHO announced that China had told them there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. At the end of January, he praised China’s handling of the outbreak, even as it was becoming obvious they had botched everything and lied about it. Just a few days ago, Tedros chose to once again parrot CCP propaganda, repeating the claim of zero new domestic cases happening in the communist country.

But throughout the constant lies and cover-up by China, Tedros has had no qualms chastising the United States over what to call the virus, perhaps the most irrelevant matter at hand right now. He also chose to criticize Western countries who ceased travel early on, claiming that it wouldn’t help to stop the spread.

What Tedros hasn’t done is spend one bit of his platform bringing accountability to China, instead choosing to obfuscate for them every step of the way. In fact, a WHO official pointedly said: “There is no blame in this” in regards to those wanting China to answer for what they’ve done.

Ryan added, “This is a time for solidarity, this is a time for facts, this is a time to move forward together, to fight this virus together. There is no blame in this.”

If you’ve ever paid attention to the sheer amount of Chinese investment in Africa, a lot of this starts to make sense. Tedros has operated as a toady because he is a toady. He previously beat out a highly qualified candidate from the United Kingdom after China used their financial clout to garner votes from developing countries they held leverage over.

Meanwhile, the push to fully exonerate China and focus only on Donald Trump is underway. Unfortunately, the partisan rancor of our media has them taking the side of China instead of trying to hold those responsible for releasing this on the world accountable. When we beat the Wuhan virus, all of this will become a major issue going forward. Hopefully, no one forgets who took what side here.