b'EditorFrom January 11th to 17th, the Communist Party provincial conclave was tak-ing place in Wuhan, and local authorities had no interest in publicizing the mystery virus that was clearly spreading person-to-person and was starting to take lives in the citys two largest hospitals. It was in the middle of this period that Chinese misinformation about the outbreak was formally broadcast throughout the world with the help of the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations official health agency. On January 14th, the WHO posted a Tweet echoing Chinas official as-sessment that no clear evidence existed that the novel coronavirus (still unnamed) was being transmitted human-to-human. On the ground in Wuhan, Chinese authorities were already backing off their own assertion, issuing a bulletin stating, The possibility of limited human-to-hu-man transmission cannot be excluded, but the risk of sustained transmission is low. Six days later, on the 20th, the Chinese government finally admitted that the virus was spreading among people, and a few days after that, Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Central China, was locked down. The next week, WHO director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited China and praised its government for setting a new standard in outbreak response. He did not specify whether he was referring to a high standard or a low one, but his comments were taken as praise.ThequestionmustWHO Director with President Xi of Chinabe begged, Who is run-ning the WHO?Dr. Tedros took of-fice as Director General of the WHO in 2017 and is the first chief of the agency to not be a phy-sicianhewasheadof healthcare in his native Ethiopia, where he was accusedofcovering-up three malaria epidemics. China is the biggest for-eigninvestorinAfrica, and Ethiopia, not exactly knownforitsbounty ofnaturalresourcesor scientificachievement, is home to the third most Chinese projects of all countries on the continent. In his January 31st declaration of a world health emergency in response to the epidemic in China, Tedros said, The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries. He further expressed his concern that the disease would spread to countries that have weaker healthcare systems than the Chinese.That wasnt enough for the WHO in fulfilling their role as propagandists for the Communist Party of China. When the novel coronavirus (a type of virus that has spikes on its surface) had spread widely enough to be assigned its own name, a function del-egated to the WHO, they chose SARS-CoV-2 due to its genetic similarity to the 2002 SARS-CoVbut thats the virus that causes the disease, which gets another name: Covid-19 in this case. The WHO stated that they chose a name that would neither scare Asian populations by using the term SARS, nor would link the disease to the geographic location where it originated, so as not to stigmitize any country.Were not making this s*** up.Sadly, we also could not make up the level of chaos and incompetence of the United States Government, whose failure to effectively respond to the Covid-19 pan-demic puts them in the company ofeveryone. The failure is universal, with pre-cious exceptions, but our agenda as news media it to tell it how it really happened, and what we must learn if we are to avoid this level of self-induced pain again.As it becomes clearer and clearer that the cure is worse than the disease, as the President was lambasted for saying, our news media, writ large, deserves a high level of criticism and scrutiny along with the elected officials who followed them.24 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINEQ2.2020 TheCoastalBend.com'