Coronavirus stimulus bill funds State Dept/USAID operations that once helped trigger polio outbreak in Syria
A look at recent USAID schemes from Pakistan to Syria shows US empire can be very hazardous to your health.
by Max Blumenthal
Part 3 - Spinning Syria’s polio crisis with Saudi assistance
Beginning in 2014, Dr. Annie Sparrow waged a crusade to blame the Syrian government for the outbreak of polio and accuse the World Health Organization (WHO) of supposedly downplaying its severity. “It missed the outbreak for many, many months and has not been able to demonstrate that it has vaccinated kids effectively,” Sparrow said of the WHO in 2014.
In an 2017 incendiary op-ed for the Qatari-backed Middle East Eye, Sparrow launched a Trumpian assault on the WHO, branding it as an “an apologist for Assad atrocities” that was “complicit in war crimes.” Whitewashing the presence of foreign-backed extremists in the country, she referred to the regions they controlled merely as “government-shunned areas.”
Sparrow was not just any public health professional with an objective concern for Syrian civilians. She was, in fact, the wife of Ken Roth, the regime change-obsessed director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), which functions as a revolving door between the NGO sector and Democratic Party-run State Departments. (Sparrow, an Australian doctor, was a former HRW researcher.)
According to a glowing 2015 profile of Sparrow in Vogue, she was not exactly a neutral party to the Syrian conflict either: “Sparrow has been working closely with the Assistance Coordination Unit—the humanitarian arm of Syria’s opposition coalition,” the magazine noted.
According to the Assistance Coordination Unit’s website, its activities were bankrolled by a $17.5 million grant from the government of Saudi Arabia, which had also established a brutal militia called Jaish al-Islam (the Army of Islam) to wreak havoc just outside Damascus.
So while she portrayed herself as a public health hero, Sparrow was “working closely” with an apparent front for one of the world’s worst human rights violators to slander the World Health Organization and destabilize a country to the point that it could no longer control preventable diseases.
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