Washington Post Misfires on WHO Story
Facts absent on alleged “real time” warnings to Trump administration
The Washington Post alleged in an April 20 front-page story that U.S. officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were well aware via the World Health Organization (WHO) of the arriving pandemic in January 2020 but their warnings to the Trump administration fell on deaf ears. The poorly-sourced story is clearly meant, not to provide good, factual information, but instead to “undercut” Trump, an admission made in the third paragraph of a 40-paragraph story.
The Post headline reads: “U.S. experts at WHO chronicled virus’s rise.” The story implies that U.S. staffers from the CDC “were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials officials.”
The story continues: “The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s assertion that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.” The story takes on added impact because Trump has suspended the U.S. 2020 financial contribution of approximately $500 million to the WHO.
The Post story fails to back up any of its claims via quotes from the two CDC officials who are named, who were not interviewed, examples of e-mails or memos they wrote, or even references to WHO warnings of a pandemic the WHO might have sent to anyone — CDC, White House officials, or otherwise — in January 2020.
The story quotes a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the CDC is a part, who says there were 17 U.S. government employees working at the WHO, which is based in Geneva, in January 2020, 16 of them from the CDC.
One has to read down 30-plus paragraphs before any CDC staffer is mentioned. Only two are. One is Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine, who is on a WHO advisory committee dedicated to track “public health emergencies of international concern.” Cetron is not quoted in the story, nor are there any anonymous quotes attributed to any warning he may have raised, publicly or privately, to officials at the CDC or the White House in January. There is no indication he was even contacted by the Post. We are not told anything about his advisory committee, such as what it flagged to the WHO proper about a coming pandemic, i.e. did it submit recommendations and, if so, when, and saying what?
The second CDC official is Ray Arthur, director of the global disease detection operations center at the CDC. He has no connection to the WHO, according to the story. He was simply participating “in the CDC daily ‘incident management’ calls, discussing information he learned from WHO officials.” Arthur is not quoted in the story and there apparently was no effort to interview him. There is no indication what he might have said to White House officials about a coming pandemic.
Nor were there any quotes from the 16 CDC employees working directly at the WHO, either with their names attached or anonymous. It is not clear any were contacted. Neither was there information on how high up any of the 16 were in the WHO hierarchy.
Had the Post wanted to dump on Trump, it could have cited specific warnings from the WHO in December 2019 or January 2020, whether by U.S. officials or not, warning about a potential pandemic breaking on U.S. shores. That would have been a solid, meaningful story which would have certainly indicted the Trump administration.
