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“Special Report” anchor and executive editor Bret Baier told “Bill Hemmer Reports” Thursday that China appears to be increasing its public relations efforts in a bid to blunt the fury of the international response to its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s a real effort by China to step up its PR game, its propaganda game, around the world and to send aid not only to the U.S., [and] to Europe,” Baier said, “but to be the benevolent player in the coronavirus scandal because it really is a scandal in the early days [in terms] of what those numbers were coming out of China.”
Baier also noted that Japan, Beijing’s third-largest trading partner, recently instituted a $2 billion fund for companies that take production out of China and either back to Japan or to another nation.
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“I think there are going to be real pushes not only in the U.S. but around the world to pull out of China as a result of this coronavirus deal,” he said.
Baier then discussed whether President Trump will follow through on his threat to cut funding to the World Health Organization, saying the administration will “use this money and the biggest funding being the U.S. at the WHO as leverage to try to make change inside the WHO.”
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The anchor said Trump will likely handle the organization in a similar way to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, some of whose members the president has criticized for not spending at least two percent of their GDP on defense.
“The president has done this numerous times,” Baier said. “There’s a lot of criticism about the WHO to go around, but in the middle of a crisis, a pandemic, may not politically be the time to pull that plug.”
