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 AbusesWHO’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.