We’re supposed to trust the World Health Organization’s advice and counsel about COVID-19, even though WHO is the source of misinformation like this:

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG — World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020

That complete lie was in January. And this complete lie was three weeks ago, brought to you by the Global Times, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party:

In an interview with Channel 4 on Mar 4, Dr Bruce Aylward of the @WHO praised #China‘s #coronavirus prevention work, saying potential patients were well-organized and tested quickly. Potential patients receive excellent care during their 14-day quarantines. pic.twitter.com/RwzKI0OyAB — Global Times (@globaltimesnews) March 6, 2020

There is absolutely no reason to believe any of this is true.

Now Dr. Bruce Aylward is back in the news for another reason. Tom Grundy, Hong Kong Free Press:

The World Health Organization’s assistant director-general Bruce Aylward ended a video call with an RTHK [Ratio Television Hong Kong] journalist after she asked him about Taiwan’s status.

At first, the epidemiologist appeared to pretend not to hear producer Yvonne Tong’s question about whether the UN body would reconsider Taiwan’s membership. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear your question, Yvonne… let’s move to another one then,” he said…

He then ended the interview, which was part of RTHK’s weekly news show The Pulse.

‼️WOW‼️ Bruce Aylward/@WHO did an interview with HK’s @rthk_news & when asked about #Taiwan he pretended not to hear the question. The journalist asks again & he hangs up! She calls back & he said “Well, we’ve already talked about China.” ENJOY+SHARE THE MADNESS! #CoronaVirus pic.twitter.com/jgpHRVHjNX — 😷Hong Kong World City 🖐🏻☔️ (@HKWORLDCITY) March 28, 2020

It’s obvious that either Aylward won’t answer the question or someone is preventing him from answering it.

But it gets weirder. I got curious about Bruce Aylward, so I Googled him. Here are the first two search results:

But when you click the links, here and here, Aylward is nowhere to be found. WHO has scrubbed him from the site.

(UPDATE: The second link is working now. It wasn’t before.)

For the time being, those deleted pages are still available at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Here’s his bio:

So: Why did Bruce Aylward behave that way during that interview, and why did WHO just scrub him from their site? Is he okay? Is he physically safe? And can anyone at WHO explain any of this?