• Taiwan tried to warn WHO on COVID
TAIPEI — Taiwan health officials sent an e-mail to the World Health Organization (WHO) about the coronavirus when they heard patients were getting ill with a mysterious pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan on Dec. 31, but the UN health body ignored it, according to a report in Time magazine on Tuesday.
The Taiwanese were asking the WHO for more information on the virus.
“The inquiry has since become fodder for the political brawl between China and the US and threatens to bruise the reputation of the UN’s health agency as it leads the fight against an unprecedented global pandemic,” said Time magazine, quoting an interview with Taiwan’s top health official. Taiwanese and US officials have seized on the e-mail to argue the WHO ignored an early warning that the coronavirus could likely be transmitted between people. In the weeks following the Dec. 31 note, the WHO echoed Chinese officials that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”— even as cases began cropping up that raised suspicion of contagion.
In an interview with Time, Dr. Lo Yi-chun, the deputy director-general of Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), says the WHO should have acted on Taiwan’s query by conducting its own investigation. Instead, he says the WHO “provided a false sense of security to the world.”
The WHO has defended its handling of the outbreak and says it relies on member countries like China to accurately report their findings.
It also notes that Taiwan’s e-mail did not explicitly mention human-to-human transmission, and that the selfgoverning island was not the first nor the only one to contact the organization about the disease.
Yet the scrutiny has intensified. US President Donald
Trump — facing criticism over his own government’s response — has cited Taiwan’s e-mail as evidence of the WHO allegedly helping China coverup the severity of the outbreak, and suspended US contributions to the health agency in April. Both Beijing and the WHO deny any concealment.
On Tuesday, Trump threatened to make the funding freeze permanent in a letter sent to the WHO leader as nations gathered virtually for the WHO’s annual decisionmaking meeting.
Despite the WHO’s assurance that there was no proof of COVID-19’s human-to-human transmission, Taiwan didn’t wait to step up precautions.
On Dec. 31, the island began instituting health screenings for all flights arriving from Wuhan.
“We were not able to get satisfactory answers either from the WHO and we got nervous and we started doing our preparation,” Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu tells Time.