UNMASKED: World Health Organization (WHO) refuses to join global effort to close all ‘wet’ animal markets
Ashley Byrne (PETA): The WHO is the agency that the entire world is looking to for guidance. It's reprehensible that they have not recommended that all Wet markets be taken down.
CHRIS WHITE: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are one of many animal rights activists that are demanding China end so-called wet markets before they create an even deadlier coronavirus strain… PETA wants the World Health Organization (WHO) to pressure China into shutting down the market… Other animal rights groups are also expressing dismay. International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), for one, wants legislatures throughout Asian countries to ban wet markets, which are highly lucrative in China… China’s wildlife-farming industry is valued at $74 billion, Business Insider noted in February…
These markets where live and dead exotic animals are often sold side-by-side in squalid conditions are getting scrutinized more closely as experts determine the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, likely originated from one in Wuhan, China. PETA is taking aim at people who support these markets. “These markets are putting the world at risk. To suggest that in their present form that they are anything but dangerous is really reckless,” Ashley Byrne, associate director of campaigns for PETA, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. She was referring to people who defend such markets…
Byrne’s group revealed new video footage Wednesday that PETA says was shot in Indonesia where wet markets exist. The video, purported to be at the country’s Tomohon market, appears to show dead dogs that were boiled alive alongside caged cats… “The WHO is the agency that the entire world is looking to for guidance on this. Its recommendations are taken seriously. It’s reprehensible that they have not recommended that all wet markets be taken down,” Byrne told the DCNF.
PETA president Ingrid Newkirk asked WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in March to take action. “If we’re to prevent future pandemics, we must heed the warning of top coronavirus researchers like Dr. Danielle Anderson, scientific director of the Duke-NUS Medical School, and cut them off at the source,” Newkirk wrote… “The repeated outbreaks of zoonotic diseases (Ebola, HIV/aids, SARS, COVID-19) demonstrate that controlling wildlife trade is no longer just a conservation and animal welfare issue. It is an animal and public health issue, a biosafety issue and a national security issue,” Grace Ge Gabriel, IFAW’s Regional Director Asia, said in a statement to the DCNF in March…
Tedros, for his part, has effusively praised China for what he considers a transparent response to the coronavirus, or COVID-19, which has killed more than 30,000 people worldwide and caused governments to send economies to a screeching halt. Chinese officials told WHO in mid-January that the virus was not transmittable from animals to humans… Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is also calling for an immediate ban on live wildlife markets. Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and his Republican colleague, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, as well as Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, were among a handful of lawmakers asking the WHO to end the markets. SOURCE…
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