No one is surprised. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus believes anything a communist dictatorship tells him - because the United Nations itself is a centralized paper tiger. It rushes to endorse decisions made by countries that are going to ignore the U.N. anyway. It is the only way their ineffectiveness is not exposed to the rest of the world.
They will even endorse propaganda, something that we rightly ridicule Russia Today and Sputnik for doing. In mid-January, when their own scientists said there should at least be an expression of concern about the virus, WHO instead tweeted the dictatorship's official claim that the virus was not spreading human to human.
WHO refused to even acknowledge SARS-CoV-2 came from Wuhan, catering to activists on social media claiming that to mention the origin is somehow racist.(1) They instead bowed to China, who told them it was not a problem, that it was contained, and that it didn't even start in Wuhan. Yet researchers have been saying since SARS in 2003 that these markets with their illegal wildlife and exotic animals used for mystical beliefs surrounded by urine and feces were a microbiological time bomb.
All WHO could offer when rushing to agree with what China had decided to do regardless of what the U.N. thinks - they weren't even afraid of the United Nations in 1951 when they mostly had pitchforks to fight in North Korea, they are sure not listening now - was that "food safety and hygiene regulations" need to be in place.
So the thing that wet markets by their very nature cannot and do not have will be fine as long as a Chinese propaganda outlet says it's been done? This is the same totalitarian state that threw doctors in jail and threatened their families when they talked about the Wuhan hospitals they worked in.
A Washington Post headline (they reposted the article from fellow Chinese pandemic defenders Bloomberg) cheered that these wet markets are reopening, but that is likely because President Trump said they should be closed. It sure isn't because anyone on their staff understands microbiology.
They rationalize that the free market is solving the problem - grocery stores are taking over - but until that happens they are a key source of fresh produce. It's always strange to see Bloomberg or Washington Post talking about capitalism - the former stopped believing in it after their founder made his billions while the latter got bought by a different billionaire as a plaything and would be long dead if capitalism ruled - but free markets are only embraced when they match the political spin of the editors anyway.
NOTE:
(1) As Bill Maher, an old school liberal suddenly a pariah for the kind of critical thinking liberals once prided themselves on having, noted to great scorn from the only demographic that watches his show, the nations of Spain and Guinea will need to be given new monikers. The term Middle East must be banned from usage. Americans will need to rename the Rocky Mountains. Africa will have to change the Ebola river and the Zika forest. It will be fun to see American so-called "New Yasians" (militant culture warriors whose last names are Asian but their grandparents moved to the U.S., and seem to primarily come from New York City) tell the actual Asians in Korea to stop calling it the Hantan River. Here is hoping they never learn about Lyme, Connecticut.
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