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In the middle of January, a WHO delegation declared that there was ‘no clear evidence of human to human transmission’. Yet by then it was already quite obvious that Chinese authorities had sought to engage in a cover-up. The police had actually threatening a Wuhan doctor, Li Wenliang, with arrest for daring to warn colleagues of a new illness which had reminded him of Sars. In the end, Dr Li died of Covid-19 himself.
Rather than chasten China, WHO praised the country. Dr Tedros commended the country for its ‘transparency’ and declared that ‘if it weren’t for China the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher’. To say that this misses the point is a serious understatement. The Covid outbreak has tentatively been traced to Wuhan. The virus found in bats there is a very close genetic match for Sars-CoV-2. Sars was traced to civets on sale for human consumption in China, while another strain of influenza virus in 2013 (as well as the viruses which caused the flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968) are believed to have originated in China.
The WHO has failed for a very simple reason: both it and its director-general are far too close to China (which is, by the way, a large investor in Dr Tedros’s native Ethiopia). The WHO’s bias became absurdly clear when a Hong Kong reporter asked Bruce Aylward, head of the joint WHO–China mission on coronavirus, whether Taiwan — which has led an especially effective campaign against the disease — might be admitted to the WHO. Dr Aylward pretended not to hear the question, mindful that Beijing would not tolerate discussion of Taiwan. (Dr Tedros does not have a great reputation for transparency about outbreaks of infectious disease in any case: while serving as Ethiopia’s health minister he was implicated in covering up an outbreak of cholera.)
The WHO’s problems go back further than Dr Tedros’s time at the top. On several occasions before he arrived in 2017, it had pressed the panic button when no panic was warranted. In 2005 it claimed that the H5N1 avian flu could kill between five million and 150 million people around the world. The final death total was fewer than 500. In 2009 it declared a ‘pandemic’ of swine flu — only to apologise later, when it emerged that it was no more lethal than normal flu.
Perhaps this is what made it slow to act on Covid-19, but soon afterwards it went into full panic mode, demanding that western countries introduce Wuhan-style lockdowns. The efficacy of such draconian measures has never been tested and the true cost — in lives, not just money — might not become clear for years. The global crash certainly isn’t going to help Dr Tedros’s campaign for the whole world to enjoy universal healthcare free at the point of delivery.
A WHO that was worth its salt would long ago have worked out a protocol for dealing with new diseases. Once the Covid deaths were piling up, it urged testing — but this was not useful advice for western countries that didn’t yet have the tests. The point ought to have been made, forcefully, at a much earlier stage. The WHO should have had a detailed strategy in place for containing new infections — and one which didn’t result in crashing the global economy. If it’s beyond it to devise such a thing, it is time to hand the job to someone else.
Because you read about china
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