White House trade adviser Peter Navarro calls WHO chief one of China's 'proxies' at the UN

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Navarro: China caused tremendous damage with non-transparency on coronavirus

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on U.S. relations with China in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

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White House economic adviser Peter Navarro told "The Story" Wednesday night that China has its sights set on controlling various United Nations agencies like the World Health Organization (WHO), and is using the WHO's current director-general as a surrogate.

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"The U.N. itself has 15 specialized agencies, including the WHO," Navarro told host Martha MacCallum. " ... What China has been doing very aggressively over the last decade is to try to gain control of those by electing people to the top. It already controls five of the 15, also, by using proxies, colonial-like proxies, like Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus] at the WHO."

"As you can see in this crisis, the damage [done by] that kind of control by China [of] the key health organization has been absolutely enormous," he said. "They suppressed the human to human transmission [data], they refused to call it a pandemic.

"They basically discouraged travel bans," Navarro added, in an apparent critique of Tedros' leadership.

Navarro told MacCallum that President Trump is seriously considering cutting funding to the WHO after the president accused the agency of botching the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

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"It all tracks to China's view of the world and how they want to control different types of international organizations, even as they don't play by the international rules," he said. "So it's going to be up to the president to look at this."

Navarro added that the U.S. government and its health care apparatus "lost about five weeks" of preparation for the pandemic because Beijing was "nontransparent."

"All I can keep telling you is that China's attempt to control basically every organization within the United Nations for their colonial powers, through bribery and other things, [has caused] tremendous damage to this country and to the world."