Juno News - May 21, 2020


The stark difference between Trudeau's and Trump's response to the WHO


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

122.942726

Word count

498

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic on March 11th, but it wasn t until five days later, on May 18th, that the United States demanded that the WHO commit to major substantive improvement or lose all funding from the World Health Organization.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The differences between Canada's response about the World Health Organization and that of the
00:00:11.120 United States couldn't be more stark. There is no question the WHO failed in its initial handling
00:00:19.140 of the coronavirus and in saying that I mean it failed the world by spending the bulk of January
00:00:26.480 claiming there was no human-to-human contact of virus contagion. They kept it up throughout the
00:00:33.040 month in the face of this becoming a global pandemic. The end of January the U.S. president
00:00:39.400 shut down all incoming flights from China. In fact they repeated over and over China's claims
00:00:46.820 and they kept that up for weeks. It wasn't until January 30th the WHO declared a public health
00:00:53.840 emergency. It wasn't until March 11th that the WHO finally declared a global pandemic after it had
00:01:03.260 killed more than 4,000 people and infected more than 100,000. On May 18th President Trump sent a letter
00:01:12.120 to Dr. Tedros who heads the WHO essentially telling him the organization had 30 days to commit to major
00:01:20.260 substantive improvement or he would freeze all funding from the U.S. to the WHO. That's a substantial
00:01:28.440 amount of money estimated at 450 million dollars annually. China in contrast contributes less than 10% of that
00:01:38.280 amount. Yet the WHO has essentially been carrying China's water throughout this pandemic. In Canada
00:01:47.020 on the other hand Justin Trudeau waited for a further five days after the WHO declared the pandemic to
00:01:54.760 take any action. In point of fact Canada's public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam kept assuring Canadians
00:02:02.500 there was nothing to fear. She was essentially just repeating WHO talking points.
00:02:08.400 On Monday testifying before the standing committee on health in parliament she admitted that Canada could
00:02:18.900 have moved more quickly. Could have? She was appointed to the position as Canada's chief health officer
00:02:26.420 on June 26 2017. Yet she is still profile on the website of the WHO as part of the independent oversight and
00:02:36.000 advisory committee. No wonder she was just parroting what the WHO was spouting.
00:02:43.200 Earlier this week on the same day as President Trump fired off his letter to the WHO, Canada's
00:02:49.760 International Development Minister Karina Gould appeared on CBC's Power in Politics. She was asked if the WHO
00:02:57.920 should be more skeptical of China. Gould replied, quote, I'm not sure that that's the place for the WHO
00:03:04.400 because the WHO is a product of its member states and I think that each member state can push for openness
00:03:11.760 and transparency, unquote. She also said she believes the WHO has provided the most accurate and up-to-date
00:03:21.120 information it had access to. Really. Donald Trump has taken the world lead to try and hold the WHO
00:03:31.280 accountable and the position of Canada's government seems, well, they did the best they could.
00:03:40.400 Well, they did anything but. They have proven they are just another ineffectual branch of the United 1.00
00:03:46.720 nations. And in doing China's bidding, they have failed the world. For True North, I'm Leo Knight. 0.95