By Cathy Burk From Newsmax

The selection by the World Health Organization of former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark to help lead a panel assessing the global response to the coronavirus pandemic is raising the hackles of WHO’s U.S. critics — and suspicions the supposedly all-encompassing probe will be a “whitewash.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — under fire from the Trump administration for its early handling of the outbreak and deference to China throughout — announced the appointments of Clark and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to head the Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response on July 9.

And though he made no reference to the Trump administration’s plan to withdraw the United States from participation in the U.N. health agency, Clark has had no such reservations.

In an interview in April with WION, Clark was more outspoken about the U.S. decision, criticizing a move prompted by concerns that WHO was too close to China, viewed by many experts as the source of the coronavirus.

“To withdraw funding from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic is clearly foolish,” she said .

“About 15 percent of the WHO’s budget comes from the United States of America and actually the biggest share of that funding goes to very important programs, like the eradication of polio.”

She also took a swipe at the United States for its demand that a U.N. Security Council resolution on the virus explicitly include a mention of the novel coronavirus’ Chinese origins, whether it be from the wet markets of Wuhan in Hubei Province or Wuhan-area lab research gone awry.

“If you, as a major country with a veto power on the Security Council, enter the room with the attitude that you are determined to have in the resolution a name for the virus which is not the scientific name but the name of the place where the virus came from, then you know you don’t really want a resolution, you’re just entering a blame game,” she scolded. Many officials, including in the administration, have referred to the virus as the Wuhan Virus because of its perceived point of origin.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bluntly admitted he wasn’t optimistic about the WHO investigation, particularly given the Chinese government’s lack of transparency in the past.

“This is a regime that failed to disclose information they had about a virus that’s now killed over 100,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands across the world, cost the global economy trillions and trillions of dollars, and now is allowing the World Health Organization to go in to conduct what I am confident will be a completely, completely whitewashed investigation,” he said, Fox News reported.

On a related note, the head of U.N. Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog, was livid about Clark’s praise of Cuba’s response to the pandemic in March.

“Helen Clark has an attraction to Communist dictatorships. Here she is showering praise on Cuba’s Communist regime for sending doctors abroad,” Hillel Neuer tweeted.

In a separate posting, he also blasted her remarks in an interview in which she “refuses to answer if she’ll investigate China’s influence over WHO.”

Fox News, which reported on the conflict over Clark’s appointment, did note that she has been critical of the Chinese response and said it took seven days after Chinese officials determined the virus was a “huge threat” to warn their people.

“In that seven days, millions began traveling for the Lunar New Year and in Wuhan. … There were thousands of people at mass events, so this is pretty disturbing,” she said in an interview by Global Americans and the Canadian Council for the Americas.

“If you want to be a great power that is respected, and fear doesn’t bring respect, then you have to be upfront as utterly transparent with the international community,” she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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