19
Apr
2023
Watch
EU Global Health Strategy (debate)
Madam President, dear colleagues, it would have been totally irresponsible to hand over more power to the WHO and the European Commission, under the pretext of effectively fighting future health crisis, when they failed to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The WHO was notified by Taiwan in December 2019 that there was a deadly pulmonary virus in China, but the WHO refused to alert the whole world about it because it was more interested in protecting the image of China than protecting the health of billions of people. The WHO declared a global pandemic only on 11 March 2020, after it said initially that the coronavirus was not human—to—human transmissible. The first two months of 2020 would have been essential in stopping the spread of COVID by isolating China until they could contain the virus. But that did not happen. Instead, the Western world was in lockdown as of April of 2020, which didn’t stop the spread of the virus but actually killed our economies. Also, healthy people were considered symptomatically infected while autopsies were not conducted on people who died of COVID so we would know on time how this virus kills. Clearly, the WHO and the European Commission does not need more power to deal with this future pandemic, but actually to be made accountable for how they handled the last one!