(TibetanReview.net, Mar26’20) – China has been criticized for donating less than 3 percent toward a $675 million coronavirus fundraising drive of the World Health Organization (WHO), given the fact that the world is reeling from this pandemic because of evidence that its officials hid information about the outbreak for weeks as it occurred in the central city of Wuhan, destroyed evidences of the new unknown infection, and stifled doctors who tried to sound the alarm.
“China, who started the pandemic, ponied-up a paltry $20 million,” nypost.com Mar 25 quoted a senior Trump administration official as saying. China’s cheapness was “shocking and a disgrace,” the unnamed official has said.
The official was reported to feel that China should pay at least half of the $675 million if not the full amount.
The report noted that the Chinese government’s contribution to the WHO fundraising drive lagged behind Kuwait, which contributed $40 million, Japan, which gave $47.5 million, and Germany, which chipped in $28 billion.
The report noted that China’s culpability for the virus emerged as a key point of debate last week as President Donald Trump repeatedly called Covid-19 “the Chinese virus”, rebuking a Chinese government spokesman’s claim that the US government had engineered the lethal respiratory bug.
In its propaganda drive, China presents itself as the leader in the fight against the global pandemic without any sort of acknowledgement of responsibility for having been the cause of it, bringing the world to its current state of alarm and tragedy.
“Since the virus started in China in December, the Chinese Communist Party has retaliated against its citizens and journalists in China for making information public, launched disinformation campaigns around the world, and limited the international community’s access to valuable public health information,” the senior US official was quoted as saying.
The official has called it “shocking and a disgrace” that China refuses to pay even 3 percent into the world fund to respond to the virus that their own actions caused to spread rapidly outside of their country.
The report noted that while the US has given less than China — just $14.7 million – to the current fund, its annual contribution to the WHO — $58 billion — was more than double China’s $28.7 billion.
