How they see us: Abandoning the WHO to China
The World Health Organization has become a battleground in the clash between the U.S. and China, said Mark MacKinnon in The Globe and Mail (Canada). The U.N. agency’s annual meeting was held remotely this year, but U.S. President Donald Trump still didn’t attend. Instead, Health Secretary Alex Azar teleconferenced in to lambast WHO for not demanding more transparency from China when the pandemic started late last year. “That failure,” he said, “cost many lives.” The Trump administration has already punished WHO by suspending U.S. funding for the body—some $400 million a year, more than any other country provides. But the U.S. has few allies in this fight. Ahead of the meeting, it supported a “sharply worded” Australian proposal for a probe that would have sent an independent inspection team to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus originated. But after China threatened to boycott Australian beef, Australia instead backed a vaguer European Union proposal for an “impartial” inquiry into WHO’s pandemic response. Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, appeared magnanimous, promising $2 billion to help countries battle Covid-19. Trump’s only offering was a letter to WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that bemoaned the agency’s “alarming” dependence on China and warned it had 30 days to reform or see the U.S. withdraw from the organization.
That letter was riddled with factual errors, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian (U.K.). Trump claimed, for example, that Taiwan had warned WHO about human-to-human transmission on Dec. 31, when in fact Taiwan had merely asked about reports that Wuhan residents were being isolated after falling sick with a mysterious pneumonia. Trump also claimed that British medical journal The Lancet had reported on the virus in late 2019; The Lancet responded that it had published no such report. Trump is desperately trying to divert attention from his own failures, said the Global Times (China). He wasted the precious months that China’s Wuhan lockdown bought him and did not prepare his country with masks, ventilators, or testing and tracing capacity. More than 90,000 Americans are dead because of his administration’s laziness, though Trump wants the world to believe China and WHO are the true culprits. But “manipulating the international community is not as easy as Washington thought,” as proved by Australia’s wise retreat on its call for an investigation into China’s handling of the virus.
In fact, Beijing has much to answer for, said Friederike Böge in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany). Chinese authorities “initially masked the virus outbreak” and are “still reluctant to provide data, virus material, and information” to other nations. But Trump has no standing to criticize WHO’s early praise of China’s response to the virus. After all, the
U.S. president tweeted in January that his country “greatly appreciates [China’s] efforts and transparency.” The planet needs a robust WHO. Does Trump really want to leave the body and cede global health leadership to China?