CV NEWS FEED // Critics blasted the leader of the World Health Organization (WHO) after he promoted an agenda to reduce the global population’s meat consumption in order to help combat climate change.
“Our food systems are harming the health of people and [the] planet,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus claimed in a recent video address that The Post Millennial posted to their X (formerly Twitter) account Tuesday.
“Food systems contribute to over 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and account for almost one-third of the global burden of disease,” he continued:
Transforming food systems is therefore essential – by shifting toward healthier, diversified, and more plant-based diets. If food systems deliver healthy diets for all, we could save eight million lives per year.
He added that he was “pleased that over 130 have signed the COP28 UAE Declaration on climate and health.” The United States under the Biden administration signed the declaration.
Journalist and lawyer Gordon Chang slammed Tedros’ address, highlighting the WHO’s alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“[Tedros] and [the WHO] should be paying attention to [China’s’] biological weapons programs—including the [Chinese] ‘genetic drugs’—instead of pontificating on matters outside their scope of responsibility,” Chang wrote on X.
After the outbreak of COVID-19, many observers across the political spectrum charged the WHO of working too closely with China.
“The WHO’s weak response to China’s mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak has laundered China’s image at the expense of the WHO’s credibility,” wrote Michael Collins of the left-leaning Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in late February 2020 – weeks before the American lockdowns. “The time is ripe for clear leadership from the WHO based on science not politics.”
Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup wrote in an April 2020 op-ed published in Foreign Policy magazine that “Beijing succeeded from the start in steering the [WHO], which both receives funding from China and is dependent on the regime of the Communist Party on many levels.”
Feldwisch-Drentrup continued:
[The WHO’s] international experts didn’t get access to the [China] until [Tedros] visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” denying after a meeting Jan. 22 that there was any need to do so.
Other X users this week criticized what they perceived as hypocrisy in Tedros’ speech.
“I wonder what plant based delicacy he eats every day and is he eating insect snacks when he is hungry?!” wrote Dr. Kat Lindley. “I suspect the answer is NO. Sometimes I listen to his words and just wonder what did we do to deserve this nonsense.”
“What is particularly galling is for an African person to be saying all these things,” replied South African scientist and wellness specialist Tim Noakes:
Tedros must know that there is widespread protein malnutrition in Africa and the goal of his organisation should be to reverse that. Not to make it worse.
Instead what he also really wants to [do] is to give Africa more vaccines. One reason why he comes to visit my neck of the woods.
The Post Millennial reported: “Some of Tedros’ words are quoted on a United Nations nutrition page titled ‘For People, Planet and Prosperity: Nutrition at COP28.’”
Again, from The Post Millennial:
The nutrition page additionally discusses the adoption of “The Global Stocktake,” which according to the page “features the groundbreaking agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, and calls on countries to implement integrated, multisectoral solutions to deliver sustainable, climate-resilient food systems as a climate change adaptation measure.”
It also says that even though such a move “represents a giant step forward,” there was still disappointment by many who feel “the phase out of fossil fuels did not go far enough, and food systems parameters did not go deeper into mitigation and efforts to deliver dietary shifts.”
