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Bill Gates, in rebuke of Trump, calls WHO funding cut during pandemic ‘as dangerous as it sounds’
President Donald Trump’s decision to withhold funding to the World Health Organization pending a review of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic is “as dangerous as it sounds,” Bill Gates said Wednesday.
“Their work is slowing the spread of Covid-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever,” the Microsoft founder and philanthropist said.
The WHO declared coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern in late January and a week later, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged up to $100 million to help contain the outbreak.
Those funds, the foundation said, would be used to help find a vaccine for the virus, limit its spread and improve detection and treatment.
About $20 million was directed toward groups including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and WHO.”
It’s not the first time the couple has directed funds toward public health causes. In 2009, they worked to combat a tuberculosis outbreak in China and a year later committed as much as $10 billion to vaccine research.
Bill Gates, who since March cautioned about the effects of delayed social distancing measures, urged the United States to implement a country-wide shutdown, saying a state-by-state strategy wouldn’t work as effectively. He predicted the number of coronavirus cases will peak in late April.
Trump said Tuesday a review of the WHO will cover its “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus,” he said.
“Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death,” Trump said.
In response to criticism by the president last week, the head of the WHO outlined a timeline of the organization’s actions in response to the pandemic, saying in a statement, “please don’t politicize the virus.”
“If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it. My short message is: Please quarantine politicizing Covid. The unity of your country will be very important to defeat this dangerous virus,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Trump said the United States funds $400 million to $500 million to the WHO each year, adding that China contributes “roughly $40 million.”
Gates’ concerns over the president’s announcement echoed ones made by the American Medical Association on Tuesday, which also called Trump’s decision “dangerous.”
“During the worst public health crisis in a century, halting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) is a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating Covid-19 easier,” the association’s president, Dr. Patrice Harris, said in a statement.
Harris urged Trump to reconsider, saying AMA was “deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications.”
Peru: At least 20 people were killed and 14 others injured in Peru after an interprovincial bus skidded and overturned in Sihuas province in the northern Ancash region, authorities said on Monday.
According to the Parobamba district municipality on its Facebook page, the “accident left 18 people dead on the spot, with two more dying while being transferred.”
The accident occurred at about 7:00 am local time on Monday in the Palo Seco area, when the bus, from the “Fama Tours SA” transport company, skidded and overturned.
It was returning from the areas of Huanchayllo and Parobamba and heading to Chimbote and Lima, after the passengers had voted in the general elections on Sunday, a local radio station reported.
Peru’s transport authorities said in a statement that it “has activated all intervention protocols to gather information related to the accident for determining appropriate measures.”
“They are not interested in the science called virology. It is more like the science of compliance.”
Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, took to his blog this morning to respond to the show of force against GraceLife Church in Canada.
Wilson, who became more widely known after his series of high profile debates with famed atheist Christopher Hitchens, in which Wilson offered stiff competition and a steady stream of witty comebacks.
Wilson’s piece, titled ‘Putting on Our Coates Coats’ confronts the disturbing news that spread across social media last week.
Coates recently served over a month in jail, only to be released and see his GraceLife Church building surrounded by fencing put up by the government. They were shut down, resulting in protests and an even larger police response.
Wilson argued that “ideas have consequences” and highlighted the differences between worldviews.
People act the way they do for reasons. As Richard Weaver taught us, ideas have consequences.
If you believe in God, if you think that the cosmos was created from nothing, if you believe that mankind was created in the image of God, then it is possible for you to believe that we have rights. And by rights, I do not mean privileges, but rather actual rights. These rights cannot be revoked by bureaucratic fiat, they cannot be abridged by executive order, and they cannot be adjusted or trimmed by the winners of elections, stolen or otherwise.
But if you don’t believe in God, if you believe that this material universe is a meaningless concourse of atoms, if you believe that life originated all by itself accidentally in a primordial goo-pond somewhere, and that we are simply simians that learned to shave, then it follows of necessity that we do not have any rights at all. We are nothing more than meat and bones and protoplasm.
Wilson said “the real travesty” occurs when followers of God go along with “the dictates of those who affirm the second scenario” and shouldn’t leave us surprised when a pastor like Coates stands up and “acts like a real pastor.”
He went on to argue that “flat refusal to cooperate” is the only way out.
“We have no business appealing to their god with any hope of getting the kind of determination that we would get if we were appealing to our God,” Wilson said.
“You can’t gather figs from thistles. You can’t get sweet water from a brackish spring. You know. You can’t order a Whopper at MacDonalds. You will not get Christian blessings from pagan gods.“
Siurces:faithwire
Bus accident in Peru; 20 were killed and 14 were injured
Peru: At least 20 people were killed and 14 others injured in Peru after an interprovincial bus skidded and overturned...
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“They are not interested in the science called virology. It is more like the science of compliance.” Pastor Doug Wilson...
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