Blaming the WHO
“Remember when the World Health Organisation made Robert Mugabe its goodwill ambassador,” asked Christopher Snowdon in The Daily Telegraph. “We all make mistakes”, but the WHO’s decision to honour that “butcher”, in 2017, suggests that it’s either “fantastically corrupt”, or “run by people who have lost their minds”. Neither is a comforting thought to have about the organisation “charged with protecting the health of everybody on the planet”. This week, Donald Trump stated that he was cutting US funding to the WHO, pending a review: he has accused it of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread of coronavirus in China, and of being too “China-centric”. Clearly, he wishes to deflect blame over the virus. But on this point, he is dead right. In mid-January, six weeks after the virus emerged in Wuhan, the WHO was still parroting Beijing’s dishonest claim that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. In February, it advised not to impose restrictions on travel from China. The WHO’s response to Covid-19 has been “dangerously inept and bizarre”.
“China acted as you’d expect,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. “Countries that run gulags aren’t typically noted for their good governance and transparency.” Beijing punished doctors and journalists who told the truth; its official death statistics are clearly lies. But the WHO is meant to be different. It’s incredible that in late January, its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was still praising Chinese officials for their “transparency”. If the WHO had done better, the virus could have been contained or slowed. But it occupies a difficult position, said Stephen Buranyi in The Guardian. For all its responsibility, the WHO has “little power” over its member nations. Its annual budget, $2bn, is smaller than many big hospitals’. It’s “like an underpaid sports coach wary of losing the dressing room”. It cajoles and encourages; it seldom publicly shames member states. Tedros has had to strike a tricky balance. It’s “an iron law” that if public health bodies act too slowly – as the WHO probably did over Covid-19 and Ebola – they are criticised for failing to save lives. But if they act aggressively – as the WHO did over swine flu in 2009 – they are accused of overreacting.
The WHO was deceived by China, said Lawrence O. Gostin and Matthew M. Kavanagh in The Washington Post. But throughout this crisis, its advice has been on the money. It called on nations to carry out aggressive testing and contact tracing, along with social distancing. States that followed Tedros’s directive to “test, test, test” – South Korea, Taiwan, Germany – have fared best. Those that ignored it have suffered. Covid-19 shows how much we need a global health body, said The Times. At present, the US pays 22% of the WHO’s budget and China 12%. US withdrawal would only create “a larger space” for China. “A better answer is to reform and improve the WHO.”