'Tucker Carlson Tonight' obtains draft letter which would partially restore US funding of WHO
The Trump administration appears on the brink of resuming U.S. funding of the World Health Organization; reaction from Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel.
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Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel responded strongly on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Friday to the breaking news that President Trump is on the verge of restoring partial funding to the World Health Organization.
"I have a message for President Trump tonight," Siegel said. "Please don't sign anything that restores funding to the World Health Organization before there is a huge overhaul of the World Health Organization."
According to a five-page draft letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus seen by "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the Trump administration will "agree to pay up to what China pays in assessed contributions" to the global health agency.
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"I think they are thugs," Siegel said of Tedros as well as WHO communicable diseases chief Ren Minghui. "I would call them international villains."
"I'm not talking about the worker bees," he added. "I'm not talking about the scientists, I'm not talking about people that really toil hard. I am talking about from the top."
Siegel added that although he respects American virologist Dr. Tony Fauci -- who Carlson noted offered effusive praise for Ghebreyesus during a White House event earlier this year -- the NIH official has a poor "choice of friends" if he likes Ghebreyesus.
"...especially a friend who is running an organization like the World Health Organization with what's happened here," Siegel remarked.
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"On January 21, German intelligence reported, [Chinese Communist Party] Chairman Xi [Jinping] called him [Tedros] and said 'delay warning the world' [about coronavirus]," the NYU Langone physician went on.
"On February 3. Tedros, who's not a physician by the way, praised ... Chairman Xi's commitment to stopping this outbreak, and then on February 15, he actually said at the Munich Security Conferences -- Tedros said that the World Health Organization believed that China's attempts to control this outbreak had bought the world time."
Carlson remarked that it appears those in charge of international public health have instead "made us sicker," and said Fauci should have been wary of Ghebreyesus given his purported "cover-up" of a cholera outbreak in Ethiopia when he was a senior health official there.
Siegel claimed that those officials should be prosecuted in an international court for what he called their "unbelievable disgrace."
"The World Health Organization," he said, "aided and abetted the spread of this virus around the world."
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