WHO’S failings

The coronavirus Covid-19 has now officially infected more than two million people. Many millions more must have had the virus in a mild form and not required medical intervention or have been asymptomatic. Never has a contagion spread so rapidly. Just one month ago, China accounted for 99 per cent of all global infections. Today, its tally represents just 4 per cent. Around 150,000 people have died from the virus or complications associated with its transmission.

The great tragedy is that it could have been prevented. The first signs of a new virus in Wuhan in China were hushed up by local authorities until it was too late to contain. Beijing is now engaged in a major propaganda effort to deflect blame. But there is another organisation that needs to be called to account. The World Health Organisation (WHO) failed in its basic function of stopping localised epidemics becoming pandemics. Health officials in Taiwan say the WHO did not pass on the warning they gave last December about a new coronavirus with human-to-human transmission.

The suggestion that the Taiwanese warning was ignored because China forbids international organisations of which it is a member from recognising the island’s existence beggars belief, given the seriousness of what has happened.

Yet Donald Trump is the only world leader who has been prepared to point the finger at the WHO’S failings – and has withdrawn America’s $400 million funding pending a review of its role in the disaster. It says much about the anti-trump obsession of his detractors that even as thousands die and economies crash, they should choose to turn on the American president rather than recognise where true culpability resides.