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“Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth blasted World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Thursday as a “globalist propagandist.”
“The only ones trying to score political points on COVID-19 are the Communist Chinese,” Hegseth told “Outnumbered“. “They were never truthful, they haven’t been truthful. Now they’re trying to reshape a narrative that it didn’t come from China at all, which of course has been easily debunked,”
“[Ghebreyesus is] either wittingly or unwittingly spewing Chinese propaganda rather than actually getting the information needed and actively and proactively disseminating it,” Hegseth said.
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More Republican lawmakers have called for the WHO to be defunded over its kid-gloves treatment of China in the initial days of the coronavirus response.
Trump has accused the WHO of being “very China-centric” and claimed they “really blew it” in their initial response to the pandemic. On Tuesday, Trump initially told reporters that the U.S. was “going to put a hold on the money sent to the WHO,” but walked back that statement when questioned, saying only that he was “going to look into” cutting off funding to the agency.
In response, Ghebreyesus told reporters Wednesday: “If you don’t want many more body bags you refrain from politicizing it – please quarantine politicizing COVID.”
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The WHO has drawn increasing scrutiny over its response to the coronavirus pandemic, with many critics pointing to a Jan. 14 tweet stating: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus”.
The spread of the virus has since forced governments around the world to shut down much of daily life.
Fox News’ Greg Norman contributed to this report.
