<!–

–>

February 4, 2024

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently complained about the citizens who are skeptical to cede national sovereignties and individual rights to his global agency, under the pending expansion of WHO powers through a revised Pandemic Treaty, and accused them of spreading disinformation.  This rings hollow because such valid legal concern should be a top concern for all of humanity following the botched WHO response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Yet an even greater hollowness echoes behind such claims—the shocking sexual predation of vulnerable women under Mr. Ghebreyesus’s authority in Congo during the Ebola crisis, for which there has been no meaningful response.

Reports about rape and sex trafficking in Congo originated from The New Humanitarian, an independent non-profit news organization initially created by the United Nations; Congo’s 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak, and the pernicious sexual exploitation of vulnerable women by WHO workers, display a complete failure of any such accountability by the WHO.

Shocking WHO Sex Abuses

WHO’s failures in Congo are epic: it did not train workers to avoid sexual exploitation; of 80 cases of sexual abuse reported in an independent investigation, 21 involved WHO employees.  Women reported being exploited with bribes or threats of retaliation, plied with alcohol, or paid for sex.  Nine victims reported being raped, including a 13-year-old girl.  Twenty-two women were impregnated and delivered their babies; others were forced by their abusers to abort.  Perpetrators refused to use protection during intercourse, infecting women and spreading STDs.  (So much for the agency’s disease prevention response!)

Investigations have shown that WHO staff were well aware of these allegations by early May 2019, but did nothing to initiate an investigation until October 2020—after an article was published exposing the abuse.  Similar abuses were reported during the WHO-directed response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak between 2014 and 2016, yet by 2020 Ghebreyesus had done nothing.

Shielding Alleged Rapists Instead of Victims

The independent commission that established the latest abuses did not investigate higher-level involvement by WHO leadership.  WHO promises of “internal investigations” have yielded nothing.  Four people were fired, but some of the worst offenders (especially Doctor Boubacar Diallo, who “often bragged about his connections to … Tedros”)  simply deny their DNA-provable criminality with impunity.  According to internal emails reported by the Associated Press:

Over 2018 and 2019, three Ebola experts, including two who worked for WHO at the time, told the AP they raised concerns about sex abuse in general, and Diallo in particular, with senior managers. But they said they were told that controlling the Ebola outbreak was more important, and two said Diallo was considered ‘untouchable’ because of his relationship with Tedros.

Two WHO officials with knowledge of the situation said the agency investigated complaints that Diallo acted unprofessionally, including an alleged sexual assault, and there was insufficient evidence to corroborate the charges. But investigators failed to interview any of the women involved or the whistleblowers who flagged the harassment claims, according to a senior WHO official who didn’t want to be identified for fear of losing his job.

A Corrupt Response

The story that emerges is that the WHO disregarded these women’s complaints, no rapists or abusers have been held to criminal account, WHO leadership has failed at every turn, and nothing has changed.  The independent commission pointedly observed that the WHO was “completely unprepared to deal with the risks/incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse” during the Congo Ebola emergency.  The WHO’s “pandemic response” in Congo ignored background checks, punished whistleblowers, empowered unaccountable sexual predators over marginalized victims, and then let them off scott-free.  It now seeks to scale up its operations and powers.

In a press conference acknowledging the abuses, Ghebreyesus apologized to victims, stating:

What happened to you should never happen to anyone. It is inexcusable. It is my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused, but are held to account. As the Director-General, I take ultimate responsibility for the behaviour [sic] of the people we employ, and for any failings in our systems that allowed this behaviour [sic]. And I will take personal responsibility for making whatever changes we need to make to prevent this happening in future. The commission has done outstanding work to get the voices of victims and survivors heard. But the investigation is not complete, and will require further work.

Congo’s sex-trafficking victims are not persuaded.  The WHO issued $250 payments to some claimants, and according to one victim, “soap, underwear, and a bucket for use for the bathroom.”  Ironically, the WHO boasts a $50 million budget “for the prevention of sexual exploitation, abuse, and harassment.”  Ghebreyesus acknowledged the Congo abuses were a “sickening betrayal” of the people they ostensibly serve, even calling the revelations “a dark day for WHO.” He also promised “severe consequences” for the perpetrators, and accountability for “all leaders” who failed to act; yet no one appears to have been criminally charged in all this violence and chaos, and internal WHO “investigations” have yielded no announcements of any accountability, by anyone.

It is hard to imagine a more dramatic breach of trust than WHO’s Congo conduct.  No safeguards to ensure such grotesque abuses do not recur have been provided.  Indeed, WHO’s Kafkaesque bureaucratic deceptions and foot-dragging reveal what an incompetent, unaccountable, crony criminal operation it has become.

Globalist Predators Unloosed?

Recent revelations that UN workers in Gaza participated in attacks against Israel mirror the same pattern of ineptly permitting the infiltration of relief operations by criminal actors as was committed in Congo—and also in Haiti, where more than 100 UN workers were implicated in a child sex ring which operated over a ten-year period.  The WHO, and its parent UN, have proven that they are clumsy bureaucratic juggernauts with no credibility.

Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus now strives to dramatically expand WHO powers over the entire world’s children for pandemic response, and scoffs at anyone who asks sensible questions about the protection of individual liberties.  If the WHO dispatches teams of sexual predators to third-world countries as a “pandemic response” and then covers for them, it can hardly be trusted to protect the world’s children from Pfizer, China, or other actors for whom it may simply be a proxy.

Perhaps the WHO should be defunded, instead of American police—the savings could be used to hire detectives to prosecute the WHO’s child rapists and paid sex traffickers, in the absence of any hope for justice otherwise.

Image: IAEA Imagebank, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

<!–

–>

<!– if(page_width_onload <= 479) { document.write("

“); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1345489840937-4’); }); } –> If you experience technical problems, please write to [email protected]