WHO’s appeasement of Beijing heightens risk of more pandemics

It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government.

On Jan 14, to widespread surprise, the WHO was still echoing China’s assurance there was no evidence of person-to-person spread: “It is very clear right now we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said an official that day. Within days, even China conceded this was wrong.

Later that month, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said his admiration for China’s speed in detecting the virus and sharing information was “beyond words”, adding “so is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries”.

At the time China’s government was punishing whistle-blowers, taking down databases, censoring scientists and ordering samples be destroyed.

China is a big funder of the WHO and its favoured candidate for directorgeneral in 2017 was Dr Tedros, an Ethiopian politician with Marxist roots and long-standing ties to China. In 2019, the WHO endorsed traditional Chinese medicine, the belief that (among other things) eating powdered pangolin scales is a miraculous cure for cancer and impotence. Such claims are leading to the trafficking and near extinction of several pangolin species.

As an instance of Chinese influence, on March 28 last year, a WHO executive, Bruce Aylward, thrice failed to answer a journalist’s question about Taiwan’s efficient response to Covid: first claiming not to have heard, then apparently cutting off the connection, and, when it was restored, responding: “Well, we’ve already talked about China.” Taiwan is excluded from the WHO on Chinese insistence.

The WHO’s defenders say it is powerless to act without member countries’ agreement, but such appeasement is not inevitable. In 2003, under Gro Harlem Brundtland, rather than praising China, the WHO lambasted it for failing to alert the world promptly to Sars. In 2014, the WHO commissioned a critical report about its own failings at the start of the Ebola epidemic, when, in order not to offend host countries, it insisted all was well long after medical charities were raising the alarm.

At the time, the WHO’s directorgeneral was obsessed with a campaign against vaping, despite evidence that it was saving lives by helping people to quit smoking.

The next year, the WHO issued a statement that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century was climate change. At the very least this pattern suggested an organisation not focused on its day job – which is to prevent and halt epidemics.

Startlingly, in 2017, The Washington Post discovered that the WHO routinely spent $200 million (£144million) a year on its travel budget, more than on Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

The most embarrassing fiasco for the WHO came on Feb 9 this year when its team of experts held a press conference in Wuhan to announce the results of a superficial two-week investigation into the origin of the virus.

The event turned into a two-hour Chinese propaganda exercise, entertaining the evidence-free suggestion Covid was imported on frozen fish or meat while ruling out even investigating the possibility that it might have leaked from the world’s leading bat coronavirus laboratory, which happens to be in Wuhan.

Afterwards, members of the WHO team backtracked, saying they were still open-minded about the lab, that they had only gone along with the frozen fish theory “to respect, a bit, the findings” of their Chinese colleagues. But the damage had been done.

It emerged last week that the team had not even asked to see the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s online database, locked since Sept 2019 and taken down altogether in the spring of 2020. It has 22,000 samples, mostly of viruses, 16,000 of them from bats.

These include eight very closely related to the virus causing the pandemic. They were collected in 2015 from a disused mineshaft, 1,000 miles away, where in 2012 six men fell ill with a disease very like Covid.

Had a western city with a big virus lab been the site of origin of a pandemic that killed nearly three million, it would never be allowed to get away with denying access to such vital resources. The WHO has wasted a year failing to investigate the origin of the virus properly, which has reduced the chances we will ever know how this pandemic began, and therefore increased the probability of another one.

‘At the very least, this pattern suggested an organisation not focused on its day job’