The Thread of The Donald

Yes, Blame WHO for Its Disastrous Coronavirus Response
Time was when the World Health Organization (WHO) was the least controversial of multilateral bodies. Its parent organization, the United Nations, is idealized by some but vilified by others. The International Monetary Fund inspires riots when it meets. The World Trade Organization has become a political punching bag. And the less said about the U.N. Human Rights Council, the better.

Much of the circumstantial evidence surrounding WHO’s coronavirus response points toward complicity.
Yet from its founding in 1948 until the first decade of this century, WHO was mainly known for defeating smallpox, fighting polio and tuberculosis, and providing support to poor countries that lacked sufficient health infrastructure. However, under the leadership of Margaret Chan, appointed director-general in 2006, and her successor since 2017, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO has bounced from scandal to scandal. Widely panned for mishandling the swine flu in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, it has also been embroiled in expenses scandals.

Then came the coronavirus.

Tedros, who previously served as Ethiopia’s health minister and then foreign minister, was elected to head WHO with Chinese behind-the-scenes support, reflecting China’s close relationship with Addis Ababa, which has become China’s bridgehead in Africa. WHO has been accused of acting as China’s accomplice in initially suppressing information about the coronavirus, with Tedros repeatedly lauding China’s “transparency” when Beijing had hid information about the virus’s origins, infectiousness, spread, and deadliness for more than a month. Although WHO’s professional staff have faced some criticism for allowing the organization’s coronavirus response to be dictated from Beijing (particularly in regard to WHO’s exclusion of Taiwan), most of the anti-WHO ire has focused on Tedros himself.

It was Tedros, after all, who on Jan. 11 complemented the director of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei—whom Tedros called “brother” in a tweet—for “sharing information [on the genetic sequencing of the coronavirus] in a timely manner,” when in fact Beijing had delayed passing on this lifesaving information for 10 days after Chinese doctors completed the research. When China announced no new cases of the coronavirus between Jan. 5 and Jan. 17—a period when we now know the outbreak in Wuhan was in full swing—WHO took this at face value. Based on the information it received from China, WHO assured the world on Jan. 12 that there was “no clear evidence of human to human transmission.” In reality, a Chinese doctor had already concluded that the new disease was “probably infectious” as early as Dec. 27.

Was WHO complicit in China’s deception, or merely credulous? Only the promised “impartial, independent” investigation commissioned by WHO’s governing body of member-state representatives, the World Health Assembly, can say for sure. But given the influence of China over the body and the dependence of the investigation on evidence supplied by Beijing, the investigation may never shed much light on the matter.

Much of the circumstantial evidence surrounding WHO’s coronavirus response points toward complicity. And that complicity seems to have come from Tedros himself.

WHO already knew at this point that Wuhan hospitals were isolating patients and that Chinese doctors were taking full precautions against possible infection.

Immediately after the first reports on Dec. 31 that something was amiss in Wuhan, Hong Kong and Taiwan started temperature screening at airport arrivals halls and alerted hospitals to be on the lookout for acute respiratory illnesses. Singapore followed suit on Jan. 3. Yet on Jan. 5, WHO reassured the world that such precautions were an overreaction. In an announcement that would be relied on by many countries deciding on their initial public health responses, WHO insisted there was “no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported.”

Whether WHO was merely negligent in obtaining the information, or knew but didn’t want to displease the Chinese by announcing it to the world, will be up to an investigation to find out. But WHO already knew at this point that Wuhan hospitals were isolating patients and that Chinese doctors were taking full precautions against possible infection. After all, that was what Chinese newspapers were already reporting (and may help explain the supposed lack of infections among health care workers). When a WHO team eventually conducted site visits to ground zero in Wuhan on Jan. 20 and 21, they found that at least 16 health care workers had been infected. Not publicly reported at the time, one of them was the whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, who later died of the illness.

Had Tedros been reading the news from the BBC, he would have known as early as Jan. 3 that Chinese authorities had punished eight doctors for “publishing or forwarding false information on the internet without verification.” That supposed false information, as described by the BBC, included warnings on Chinese social media that the emerging Wuhan pneumonia resembled the 2002-2003 outbreak of SARS. In addition to the description of the new disease, the punishment of doctors for sharing information should have rung alarm bells at WHO about China’s vaunted transparency. Instead, the report and incident went unnoted.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/27/who-health-china-coronavirus-tedros/