Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via Associated Press
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), waits prior the opening of the 146th session of the World Health Organization Executive Board, at the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, Feb. 3, 2020. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)
- Books will one day be books written about President Donald Trump and his administration's litany of coronavirus denialism and incompetence.
- But they should spare a few chapters for the World Health Organization (WHO) for credulously parroting bogus information from the Chinese Communist Party that proved to be a danger to global health.
- The Chinese government squashed its own country's coronavirus whistleblowers, and misled the public and the international community.
- In public statements, the WHO repeatedly praised the Chinese government for its transparency and effective measures at containing the coronavirus, when it had actually done neither.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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There will one day be books written about President Donald Trump and his administration's litany of coronavirus denialism and incompetence that helped lead the nation into the ongoing historic disaster.
Given the culpability, it's no surprise the president is trying to deflect blame. And while some of this has led to slapdash attempts to blame his predecessors, mostly former President Obama, there is one target of Trump's that will also face history's judgment: the World Health Organization.
Trump screwed this up, but the WHO deserves its share of blame
Before addressing the WHO's culpability in allowing the coronavirus to swell from a local crisis to a global pandemic, it is important to emphasize that the US government had its own string of systemic failures.
The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control - which refused to bestow official government permission to university and private researchers to develop their own COVID-19 tests - caused crucial weeks at the onset of the pandemic to go completely wasted.
Dr. Helen Chu, a Seattle-based infectious disease expert went rogue in late February and without the government's blessing conducted tests which quickly found the disease was popping up in the bodies of people who had not traveled abroad. Those results made Chu and her colleagues certain the country was dangerously behind the curve when it came to identifying and containing the virus.
But inflexible state and federal bureaucracies ordered them to stop conducting tests, and did nothing with their data.
The US government's failures are Trump's failures, even if he takes "no responsibility."
That's why it's unsurprising that Trump wants to deflect all the blame toward a new villain: the WHO, who he claims is in the pocket of the Chinese government.
And by attacking the WHO, he's given the Trumpist clapping seals of Fox News' prime time lineup a new boogeyman to rail against.
But there's a bit of the "stopped clock is correct twice a day" fallacy happening here.
The WHO absolutely bears a great deal of responsibility for abdicating its role as the world's leading health authority and amplifying the Communist Chinese Party's falsehoods about the coronavirus. For these sins, the organization deserves scorn and continued skepticism.
That remains true, even if Trump is the one saying it.
The WHO chose politics over truth, and the world suffers as a result
On the subject of taking responsibility, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's Director General, has some explaining to do.
Dr. Tedros - China's preferred nominee to lead the WHO - had previously overseen Ethiopia's healthcare system at a time when it had been reportedly covering up three separate cholera epidemics. Now on his watch, he's allowed the WHO to uncritically repeat the Chinese government's unreliable reporting.
In January, the WHO tweeted that "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel." Also in January, Tedros praised China for quickly mapping the virus' genome and its government's "commitment to transparency." Then in February, Tedros credited China for taking measures that gave the rest of the world "a fighting chance" to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Human-to-human transmission was evident as early as December, when the doctor now credited with discovering the coronavirus was punished by the regime before dying of the virus.
The Chinese government didn't immediately share the virus' genome with the international community for at least a full week afterward. And "transparency" is an offensively laughable term to use to describe a brutal authoritarian dictatorship like China's.
If Tedros and the WHO are spreading this misinformation, it can only mean one of two things: They're either completely incompetent or afraid of offending the Chinese government.
Taiwan? Never heard of it.
Any entity that deals with the Chinese government knows it has to toe a very delicate line with regards to Taiwan, a democratic island nation that China insists is not an independent state, but rather, Chinese sovereign land.
The WHO, for its part, doesn't include Taiwan as a member since the country is not recognized by the United Nations.
That's why the WHO until recently wouldn't even acknowledge Taiwan's success in managing the coronavirus' spread (the WHO also shamefully ignored Taiwan's early warnings about the spread of the coronavirus).
This was made most plain when Bruce Aylward, a Canadian senior WHO adviser seemed to pretend not to hear an interviewer's question about Taiwan, then disconnected the call, then refused to answer the original question once the interview reconnected with him.
To be fair to Aylward, the only honest answer he could offer would be to admit that the WHO's leadership is too afraid of damaging its relationship with the Chinese government, a major funder of the organization.
The WHO also publicly opposed travel restrictions on travelers from China in January. This was at the urging of the Chinese government, despite the fact it knew human-to-human transmission was possible.
To his credit, Trump's shutdown of travel from China in late January proved to be the right thing to do for public health, despite the howls from many quarters that it was unnecessary, counterproductive, and xenophobic.
Sure, Trump hardly ever needs an actual legitimate reason to call for closing America's borders to foreign travelers, but whatever his motives were, it was a tactically correct thing to do as the health emergency began to go global (even if we're now finding out just how many travelers were able to cross into the US from China even after Trump's restrictions were put into place, as well as the extent of the disease's spread into the US via travelers from Europe).
Is the WHO for the world, or for China?
The Chinese Communist Party - the same one that last year put upwards of a million Uighur Muslims in re-education slave camps - is not a friend to the global community, or the truth, especially when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic.
There's ample reporting that CCP officials did everything they could to squash anyone publicizing the truth about the virus.
From the doctors who first identified the disease to the hospital officials who raised alarms about the virus' ability to spread between humans, Chinese government apparatchiks silenced the whistleblowers for "spreading rumors ... and causing social panic."
This, of course, created a chilling effect on educating health officials and the public to take the proper precautions.
And the health commission in Wuhan - the province where the coronavirus emerged - was apparently so intimidated by Beijing that when the crisis began to spiral out of control in mid-January, it was still reporting zero new infections for a period of almost two weeks.
This doesn't mean we should endorse a Trumpian "burn it all down" anti-globalist agenda when it comes to the WHO.
What it means is the global community should demand an answer to the question: If the WHO is more beholden to the Chinese Communist Party than the truth, then what is the WHO for?
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