WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left) with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China last January
This morning
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) says he is “very disappointed” China blocked the entry of its investigators.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ team had been due to investigate the origins of Covid-19 in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Via Financial Times:
Beijing has barred the entry of a 10-member World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic after their visas were not approved.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said on Tuesday that he was “very disappointed” after China blocked the arrival of the virologists.
“Two members [of the team] had already begun their journeys and others were not able to travel at the last minute,” Mr Tedros said.
Anyone?
China blocks WHO team sent to probe Covid’s origins (FT)
AFP
Meanwhile…
Breaking: Dozens of Hong Kong opposition activists arrested for violating national security law https://t.co/K2apXYnUCn
— SCMP News (@SCMPNews) January 5, 2021
Trump was right.
The WHO is a wholly discredited organisation which has been shambolic through the Covid crisis.
Why are they only now attempting to get into China, nearly a year after the original outbreak ?
And have they made up their minds yet whether masks are effective or not ?
Ah, yes Trump. The man who let 350,000 people die. Nice one. Almost as dumb and reckless as the other bully BoJo- How many dead in UK now? Do you know? Does anyone care?
Now you going to blame the WHO- typical coward.
Think they made up their mind on masks a long time ago. Think it has been widely reported that the initial advice was based on two primary factors: incomplete info about the transmission rate and shortage of supply globally i.e. they needed PPE for front line workers.
Imagine being allowed to initially be wrong or update your opinion based on more info or changed circumstances.
Thought you would be ij favour of a U-turn, Bojo does them daily, chap. No lockdown, lockdown. No free school meals during the holidays, free school meals during the holidays. Schools will return, school return is delayed.
On a separate note, why is there nothing on Broadsheet yet about the Georgia senate races????
“why are they only now attempting to get into China?”
theyve been attempting to get into China since December 2019 – that’s how long and tiresome negotiations have been
And charger runs for the hills. Well, not figuratively obviously.
waddles to the biscuits
Roars upstairs to mam for what’s left.
Meanwhile:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55464564
Shouldn’t there be sanctions rather than investment deals?
German manufacturing says….no.
Great bunch of lads.
You can’t trust communists. Pure and simple. They will always lie to protect corrupt leaders.
you can’t trust capitalists, pure and simple. they will always lie to protect themselves and their profits.
Burn them all I say
A citizen of a capitalist country enjoys freedom. No citizen of a communist country has ever been free.
ownership of means of production in the hands of the people, enjoying unhindered access to all articles of consumption without any exploitation of labour or anything else implies a high level of freedom to me
maybe if capitalist bullies let communist idealists make a fair go of it, we could judge better
“maybe if capitalist bullies let communist idealists make a fair go of it, we could judge better”
Sweet Jesus…
get your jackboot off my ideals
@Brother Barnabas
Communism lead to the deaths of 100 million in the 20th Century in China, Russia, and more. It is the worst ideology of all! Good God!
Funny but I’m of a mind to watch the Death of Stalin later.
Death of Stalin is great! Really funny and bizarre
@Junkface
“Communism lead to the deaths of 100 million in the 20th Century in China, Russia, and more. It is the worst ideology of all! Good God!”
communism is an ideology – and if you want to reduce it to one idea, it’s about the construction of a compassionate society. if you’re talking about atrocities in the soviet union, china etc during their respective so-called communist eras, that was nothing to do with communism. in fact, neither the chinese nor the soviet model was communism – certainly not in the marxist-leninist sense, which is what i’m interested in. they were more a hybrid of state capitalism and command economy. proper communism – taking its cues and ideas from marxism-leninism – has never been put in practice.
freedom only to work to make a profit for oligarchs. honestly, how ‘free’ do you think you really are?
It’s comments like these that remind me why I frequent this site less and less.
It’s like engaging with teenagers.
ok andrew, while you’re gone why don’t you google ‘authoritarianism’ and stop confusing yourself with left and right wing politcal theory.
You are free to choose everything except your circumstances.
If someone from a marginalised demographic wants to be rich, sure they can give it a whack. But they face a whole heap of challenges to that. Differing peer pressures, upbringing, formation, access to opportunities etc. Someone from a more wealthy demographic has a lot of systemic/systematic advantages, more likely to go to college, eat better as a child, developing a network of advantageous contacts etc.
Not saying everyone, always good news stories. Talking about likely outcomes in general.
@scottser
Thats true, but you can criticize corruption and publish articles on it and expose it under capitalism. Communists do not allow that. Kidnap, labour camp, torture, or kill is their way.
Chinese people live in a police state. They are not free in any way.
ideally junkface you are correct. however capitalist societies are far from ideal. how would a palestinian criticism of corruption be taken by israeli authorities? or even the abuse that maurice mccabe went through as a whistleblower?
authoritarian regimes are always nasty, no matter what their colour. one might kill and torture while another might surveil and manipulate in more benign but just as effective ways; it all leads to hegemony.
I agree with some of what you say, but then again I’m more of a democratic socialist than total capitalist. You need a bit of both for a fair society. Corruption is a massive problem in the world right now. No political system is free of it.
I think maybe you are not aware of the full horrors of communism throughout history. There are great documentaries about communism in Russia and China on youtube. Be warned, the ones about Russia are so grim that I challenge anyone to sit through the whole thing in one go. Its really, really shocking and grim.
Even Karl Marx suggested a great cull was needed for his political revolution to happen in his first book. In other words genocide, and that’s where communism has always lead.
karl marx did advocate genocide, Junkface
you’re getting your information, I’m assuming, from US texts/publications
marxism terrifies them, unsurprisingly
*did not
i think we agree on more than we disagree on JF.
…I must admit that it’s a long time since I read Marx and even then I found it hard going…Marxist-Leninist political philosophy I’d be more familiar with…just remind me where Marx proposed a ‘cull’…
…if you have a problem with ‘cull’ or ‘purge’ it’s the thing that some Broadsheet commenters have been advocating for many months here…
Any word on Jack Ma?
If you are a citizen of China and criticize the Chinese Communist Party, you will quickly find that China does not have citizens, it has hostages.
Like Ireland has consumers, not citizens.
+V
Well worth a read: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
That the virus may be a hybrid that was developed in a lab is finally getting serious consideration in a mainstream publication. Regardless of whether it was released accidentally or intentionally (and by whom), I think it would go a long way towards explaining the behaviour of governments around the world in continuing to treat the virus as though it were the new plague despite its relatively low infection-fatality rate,
That it may have been released intentionally, may also go some way to explaining the direction that governments have been leading their citizens towards and all the hype, deception and secrecy seen along the way.. I think its quite reasonable to consider that governments may be acting according to the belief that we’re already in a new era of heightened bioterrorist threats..The genie is out of the bottle so to speak. They may have decided that they’ve no option but to go along with a top-down collective solution whereby liberal democracy and national sovereignty as we know them are to be sacrificed in name of biosecurity.
It could well be the case that our elected leaders have convinced themselves that the ends justify the means, and are currently in the process of ushering us all towards a new totalitarian-like paradigm, involving real-time biometric mass surveillance and the use of rapidly developed vaccines (from the article;:Fauci in 2003:“Our goal within the next 20 years is ‘bug to drug’ in 24 hours”). But it wouldn’t work to overtly force everyone into it. We must be groomed bit by bit to readily accept it.
you’re a lunatic