Bias and bad policy overwhelm the WHO – 3 warrants.
Fitzgerald ’20 [John; April 16; Emeritus professor in the Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. His books include Big white lie: Chinese Australians in white Australia and Awakening China: politics, culture and class in the Nationalist Revolution; Australian Strategic Policy Institute, “Does the WHO pose a danger to world health?,” https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/does-the-who-pose-a-danger-to-world-health/]//av
The WHO acceded a year ago to Chinese government pressure to acknowledge traditional Chinese medicine, since revealed as a plausible source of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time the coronavirus was leaping from animal to human hosts in Wuhan in October 2019, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping was telling a conference in Beijing that he applauded ‘efforts to promote [traditional Chinese medicine] internationally and fully develop its unique strength in preventing and treating diseases’. For some years he had been lobbying the WHO to recognise traditional Chinese medicine as a legitimate form of medical treatment. In May 2019, the WHO’s governing body bowed to Beijing’s pressure.
Scientists and public health specialists were appalled. One was quoted as saying that the WHO’s ‘failure to specifically condemn the use of traditional chinese medicine utilising wild animal parts is egregiously negligent and irresponsible’.
Second, late last year the WHO ignored questions from Taiwanese health authorities alerting the agency to signs of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan at a time when Beijing was downplaying concerns over social transmission. The WHO is obliged by the terms of its agreement with China to deny Taiwan formal recognition, but there’s nothing in its agreements compelling the WHO to ban Taiwan’s participation in health matters or reject the specialist knowledge and expertise Taiwan can bring to the table. This is a further result of political lobbying from Beijing.
At that time, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus accused the government of Taiwan of levelling racist slurs against him, an accusation fiercely denied by Taiwan but reinforced by an online army of trolls based in China, pretending to be Taiwanese nationals, ‘apologising’ for offending Tedros. Once again this suggests unhealthy collusion between the WHO leadership and Beijing.
By his actions, the director-general inflicted reputational damage on the WHO. Taiwan’s exceptionally low rate of infection and mortality in the Covid-19 pandemic has made Taiwan a poster child advertising the benefits of being excluded from the WHO and relying instead on alternative sources of information and analysis. The WHO doesn’t come out well when a country so clearly benefits from having nothing to do with it.
Third, the WHO was slow in sharing information about the Covid-19 pandemic and, as US President Donald Trump reminds us, it parlayed misinformation from China in its public communications. But Trump is wrong in attributing this to ‘China-centric’ behaviour on the agency’s part.