The first non-physician and first African to serve in the role as Director General of the World Health Organization. During his bid for the $260,000 a year job as the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros was serving as Ethiopia’s health minister and had served as foreign minister. He vowed to make universal healthcare his central priority if he managed to become the World Health Organization’s Director-General. Dr. Tedros hired a public relations firm to help him clinch the top job at the WHO.
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Tedros graduated from university education where he holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Community Health from the U.K.’s University of Nottingham and a Master of Science in Immunology of Infectious Diseases from the University of London. He went to work as a health official in the regime of Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, while the country was ruled by the Derg military junta.
Later, after the dictatorship was overthrown, he joined the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which was listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government in the 1990s. According to the British journalist Thomas Mountain, who has lived in neighboring Eritrea for many years and has reported on the corrupt Tigray regime, Tedros had a direct role in the atrocities alleged to have been committed by the government.
According to the BBC, Dr Tedros then joined the hard-left TPLF – which started life as a Communist party and played a major role in overthrowing Mariam in 1991. It later became part of the EPRDF, a coalition of left-wing parties that ruled Ethiopia until last year. (Daily Mail)
Tedros was the recipient of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian Award in 2011 when he was Ethiopia’s minister of Health.
As foreign minister from 2012 and 2016, Tedros became the face of a government that human rights groups accused of systematic torture, disappearances and repression of the media and civil society.
“Large-scale and unprecedented protests swept through Ethiopia’s largest region of Oromia beginning in November 2015, and in the Amhara region from July 2016. Ethiopian security forces cracked down on these largely peaceful demonstrations, killing more than 500 people,” the Human Rights Watch said in a report during the time.
“Scores of people fleeing security force gunfire and teargas during the annual Irreecha festival died in a stampede on October 2 in Bishoftu, Oromia region. On October 9, following the destruction of some government buildings and private property by youths, the government announced a draconian and far-reaching six-month countrywide state of emergency, which prescribes sweeping and vaguely worded restrictions on a broad range of actions and undermines free expression, association, and peaceful assembly.”
The report added,
“The protests occurred against a background of nearly non-existent political space: in parliament, the ruling coalition has 100 percent of seats, there are restrictions on civil society and independent media, and those who do not actively support the government often face harassment and arbitrary detention.”
It was Tedros who has been reported to have been responsible for the removal of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders following Ethiopia’s brutal massacre of Ogaden citizens in Somalia, which was immediately followed by a cholera outbreak.
When the Ethiopian government proposed expansion of the municipal boundary of the capital, Addis Ababa, in 2016, protests followed in which “security forces arrested tens of thousands of students, teachers, opposition politicians, health workers, and those who sheltered or assisted fleeing protesters.” The HRW also said the government at the time sought to control and gag the media and forced many journalists “to choose between self-censorship, harassment and arrest, or exile.”
The Times of London reported in December 2020 that an American economist nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, David Steinman, accused the 55-year-old career bureaucrat of being one of three officials in control of the Ethiopian security services from 2013 to 2015 and called for his prosecution. He alleged Tedros “was a crucial decision maker in relation to security service actions that included killing, arbitrarily detaining and torturing Ethiopians.”
In his complaint, Steinman pointed to a 2016 U.S. government report on human rights in Ethiopia that found the “civilian authorities at times did not maintain control over the security forces, and local police in rural areas and local militias sometimes acted independently”. Steinman added the U.S. report cited “other documented crimes”. He accused Tedros of being involved in the “intimidation of opposition candidates and supporters”, including “arbitrary arrest . . . and lengthy pre-trial detention”. According to the Times, the complaint also alleged that Tedros oversaw the “killing, and causing serious bodily and mental harm to, members of the Amhara, Konso, Oromo and Somali tribes with intent to destroy those tribes in whole or in part.”1
In Ethiopia’s controversial 2015 general elections, Tedros’ ruling EPRDF declared that it won all 547 seats of legislature amid reports of continued repression. (Quartz Africa)
In 2016, while Dr. Tedros was the Foreign Minister, he got into a public fight with Human Rights Watch for their reporting on the EPRDF’s brutal attacks on their own citizens.
In September 2017, about four months after Tedros, 55, was elected as WHO director-general, some U.S. doctors specializing in infectious diseases, wrote an open letter to him, holding him and the WHO responsible for refusing to classify a cholera outbreak in Sudan in an attempt to guard its global reputation. They wrote:
“Your silence about what is clearly a massive cholera epidemic in Sudan daily becomes more reprehensible. Your failure to transport stool samples from victims in Sudan to Geneva for official confirmation of cholera makes you fully complicit in the terrible suffering and dying that continues to spread, out of control, with daily new reports confirming that this is indeed a cholera epidemic.
“The inevitable history that will be written of this epidemic will surely cast you in an unforgiving light.”
In October 2017, Dr. Tedros tried to appoint Robert Mugabe as a “goodwill ambassador” for the WHO–which should tell you all that you need to know. He’s apparently not a great judge of character and is completely tone-deaf.
The plan by World Health Organization (WHO) director-general to appoint Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador has backfired and been rescinded after an international outcry…
…Mugabe, 93, one of the longest serving leaders in the world, seems a particularly unusual appointment for goodwill ambassador, given his high profile as the leader of a government with a poor record of democratic freedoms.
Critics were particularly offended at the idea that Mugabe was appointed because of his contributions to public health given the collapse of Zimbabwe’s healthcare system under his watch, along with the country’s economy in recent years. Mugabe, along with several others African leaders, has long trips abroad for medical treatment.
Source: Quartz Africa
It is believed, according to former World Bank geopolitical analyst Peter Koenig, that the appointment of Dr. Adhanom was due to Bill Gates’ influence. Tedros is the former Chairman of Gates funded GAVI Vaccine Alliance. GAVI’s sole mission is to vaccinate every child in the world. The WHO and the US and British governments are the primary partners and the largest funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Times UK reported that the appointment of Mugabe as goodwill ambassador was to appease China, a long-time supporter of Mugabe, for using its influence to have Dr. Tedros elected Director-General. The Times also notes, “China has praised the authoritarian development model of Ethiopia’s regime, which rules under emergency powers and has put down pro-democracy protests.”
While Dr. Tedros was Foreign Minister, he managed to assist in the negotiation to boost U.N. funding to Ethiopia as part of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. United Nations funding records show that Ethiopia received millions of dollars in funding–including from China who had previously contributed very little to the country.
In 2015 and 2016 China gave some $16million to Ethiopia in spending commitments and cash contributions, largely in support of food or refugee programmes.
In 2011, just before Dr Tedros took up the role, and in 2017, just after he left, China handed over another $44million in commitments and contributions.
Its total contributions outside of this period, dating back to the year 2000, were just $345,000.
Source: Daily Mail
At the time of Dr. Tedros’s appointment to the WHO, Frida Ghitis of the Washington Post noted that China “worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help Tedros defeat the United Kingdom candidate for the WHO job, David Nabarro. Tedros’s victory was also a victory for Beijing, whose leader Xi Jinping has made public his goal of flexing China’s muscle in the world.” (Emphasis added)
He is accused of covering up several cholera epidemics in Ethiopia while he was Health Minister.
According to the BBC, while he was Health Minister, “his ministry was known to discourage journalists from reporting about suspected cholera cases in the country.”
During the 2017 election itself, several groups within Ethiopia opposed Dr Tedros’s appointment due to his links with the TPLF and allegations that they stifled journalists and repressed minorities.
Dr Tedros was also accused of covering up three separate cholera outbreaks in 2006, 2008 and 2011 by mis-reporting it as ‘watery diarrhea’, allegations he dismissed as a ‘smear campaign’ by his British rival.
Source: Daily Mail
In one scathing Letter to the Editor of the Addis Standard, a Ph.D. candidate wrote:
Dr. Tedros left the Ethiopian health sector very much politicized and crippled, which has to be yet depoliticized if it has to function properly. The more than 35,000 female health extension workers trained for six months and deployed across Ethiopia during his tenure, which many praise him for, are more of political cadres who are deployed in rural household families to serve the TPLF than helping health workers. This has been verified by their own internal memos and reports on various occasions.
An article in Madote describes the conditions that doctors were working in Ethiopia under Dr. Tedros’s term as Health Minister–no access to water for handwashing, and delivering babies at night using flashlights from a smartphone were particularly jarring examples cited.
Even though he was a political appointee with no experience in health care, Dr.Tedros was lucky to have the international community pouring millions of dollars of donation to support the Ethiopian health care system from the AIDS and Malaria crises that engulfed the nation in the mid-90s.
Thousands of primary health care centers were built all over Ethiopia, and Addis Ababa particularly. Most of these buildings were built by contactors owned by the political party that Dr. Adhanom was representing. I will not go into the details of how these substandard two and three floor buildings were built to show how the government was investing in health care. The devil is in the detail. As a young health care practitioner with ambition to help the public, I was enthusiastic to give my best knowledge in to practice. The two-story building that housed about 25 health care providers, has no the bare necessities a health care office should have. In the very small room I was assigned to see patients, consumable health care items such as sterile gloves, paper exam gowns and covers for exam tables, cotton swabs, gauze, tongue depressors, alcohol prep pads, sample containers, chemical test strips, suturing equipment, syringes, disposable instruments, stethoscope, water sink, and restroom supplies were non-existent. This is a fact in most health care centers in Ethiopia.
Yes, this is the legacy of the man that has been running interference for China regarding the Wuhan coronavirus.
In 2017, at a meeting between Chinese Communist leaders and their creature Ghebreyesus, the WHO received a large financial contribution from China, which wanted to build an $80 million headquarters for the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The new centre was to be in Ghebreyesus’ home country, Communist Ethiopia. U.S. intelligence services reckon that China intends to use it as a base for spying.
However, anonymously speaking to Bloomberg, three officials said the U.S. intelligence community noted in a classified report to the White House last week that China lied about the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak, under-reporting the number of infections and deaths.
In late January 2020, Tedros met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing and then praised the Chinese government for “setting a new standard for outbreak control” and its “openness to sharing information.”
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform committee wrote to Tedros in April 2020:
“Despite the WHO’s purported mission to operate as an apolitical international institution within the United Nations, recent media reports suggest that the WHO helped Beijing disseminate propaganda, downplayed the extent of the disease, and possibly delayed ordering a public health emergency.”
“Given the actions and statements of WHO officials during the past few months, we are concerned that the WHO is no longer serving the needs of the world and is instead taking its cues from China. Throughout the crisis, the WHO has shied away from placing any blame on the Chinese government, which is, in essence, the Communist Party of China.” The Hill
Rebel Media’s Keean Bexte covered lots of this and some more interesting tidbits in the following video.
That John Martin quote cited by Bexte really does sum it all up:
In a sane world, instead of leading a global organisation, Tedros and his cronies would be put on trial at the International Criminal Court, tried for his crimes, and if found guilty, should spend the rest of his life in prison.
Source: Rough Estimate
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