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Opinion | Competing Narratives: Why China Continues To Win

Picture Credit: National Review, President Donald Trump meets with China’s President Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The narrative is changing right in front of our eyes. Following in the wake of the White House’s decision to suspend funds to the World Health Organization (WHO) over the organization’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 outbreak and relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the mainstream narrative has shifted away from pinning blame on responsible actors. Instead of exploring timelines that show a direct correlation between the misleading messaging espoused by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, it has become more convenient for some to blame the reliable scapegoat, President Trump. The most scathing of these articles, “W.H.O., Now Trump’s Scapegoat, Warned About Coronavirus Early and Often”, published in the New York Times just days after the President pulled funding from the organization, eschews sound timelines and makes two very bold assertions.

  1. From the authors’, Richard Pérez-Peña and Donald G. McNeil Jr., own intuition:

“…a close look at the record shows that the W.H.O. acted with greater foresight and speed than many national governments, and more than it had shown in previous epidemics. And while it made mistakes, there is little evidence that the W.H.O. is responsible for the disasters that have unfolded in Europe and then the United States.”

There was no ‘foresight.’ The WHO, having catered to CCP propaganda, has been playing catching up since day one, as seen by the organization’s decision to ignore Taiwan’s warning about Human-to-Human transmission on December 31st. This sentiment is best described by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and supported by their various timelines outlining the WHO’s inaction:

2. Concerning the WHO: