Did the WHO botch its pandemic response?
Donald Trump has found a scapegoat for his botched handling of the coronavirus, said the Global Times (China) in an editorial. The U.S. president has been on a tear against the World Health Organization in recent weeks, accusing the respected international body of being “Chinacentric” and too slow to raise the alarm about the pandemic. His administration is now threatening to cut the $450 billion the U.S. gives the agency each year. But the idea that WHO responded too slowly is nonsense. The organization began warning the world about the threat from Covid-19 in early January, after Chinese authorities gave it timely information about the disease’s spread in the city of Wuhan. On Jan. 30, WHO declared an international public health emergency. But Trump waited until March 13 to announce a national emergency in the U.S., and he has ordered none of the WHO-recommended measures that have helped China and other nations contain the virus: mass testing, tracing the contacts of the infected, isolating the sick. As a result, some 600,000 Americans have been infected with Covid-19 and more than 25,000 have died. It’s not WHO’s fault that “the U.S. response to the pandemic is among the worst in the world.”
Trump is right to be angry, said the Bangkok Post (Thailand). WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has heaped praise on Beijing, saying its lockdown of Wuhan “bought time for the world.” What Tedros—a former Ethiopian health minister and China’s nominee for the top WHO job—fails to mention is that Beijing’s “initial handling of the outbreak was plagued with secrecy and delays.” The country detected the first Covid-19 infections in November but silenced whistleblowers and only alerted WHO “to several cases of the unknown pneumonia in Wuhan on Dec. 31.” Even as the disease spread abroad, Beijing and WHO insisted for weeks that “there was no humanto-human transmission.” The agency even took China’s side in its feud with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province, said Charlie Moore in the Daily Mail (U.K.). Taiwan saw the pandemic coming and was among the first countries to implement social distancing. That’s why the island has seen a mere 400 cases and six deaths. But WHO, “pandering to China, kept Taiwan cut off from global information networks” and refused to publicize its success.
Sure, WHO is not perfect, said Sean O’Grady in Independent .co.uk. But it has “probably been more right than wrong,” especially in its admonition to “test, test, test.” And during a pandemic, it takes a global health agency to coordinate a global response. As the coronavirus spreads to poor developing countries, WHO will need rich countries’ support and funding to contain and eradicate this disease. We are all on this planet together, and no country will be safe from this virus as long as even one nation harbors it.