Skip to content
The WHO changed its position only after China belatedly admitted transmission between humans.When countries like the US, Italy and India banned travel to or from China, Tedros publicly opposed such restrictions on February 4th, warning that they will have “the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public-health benefit.” Tedros has further politicised WHO’s role in the current crisis by lavishing praise on Xi, saying he has displayed “a very rare leadership,” and paying tribute to Chinese “transparency,” despite the CPC’s intrinsic aversion to transparency.Founded 71 years ago, the WHO remains overly bureaucratic and too dependent on some major donors to independently coordinate international health policy, which explains China’s growing sway over that United Nations agency, including shutting the door to Taiwan’s entry. The virus spread farther and wider because the Communist Party of China (CPC) cared more about its reputation than the Chinese people’s suffering or the transnational impacts.Make no mistake: China faces lasting damage to its image. Or maybe the World Health Organisation for being complicit in the whole tawdry affair?As Rita Panahi has persuasively argued in The Herald Sun, Residents of a suburban New York City county that was one of the earliest US hotspots for the In a proposed class action, three residents of Westchester county accused the WHO of failing to declare a pandemic in a timely fashion, monitor China’s response to the original outbreak, provide treatment guidelines, advise members on how to respond including through travel restrictions, and coordinate a global response.They also accused the WHO of conspiring with China’s government, which was not named as a defendant, to cover up But WHO are not the only ones facing financial damages claims. Moves are already afoot in the US Congress to bring manufacture of essential medicines back to the US, which currently relies on China for 97 per cent of all its antibiotics.Asian countries were the first to be affected by the transnational spread of Covid-19 from China. China’s Covid-19 role, however, will rank as the most dangerous cover-up in modern history.Had Beijing sought to confine the Covid-19 outbreak to its central Hubei province by suspending all travel from there as soon as it became aware of the gravity of the problem, the novel coronavirus might not have spread to other parts of China or to other countries. If so, what is it that they’ve actually done?Secondly, following from this, just who exactly to WHO saying we should forgive? THE INCALCULABLE HUMAN and economic toll exacted by the spread of the novel coronavirus from China promises to shake up global geopolitics, including China’s position in the world. The CPC wields the big stick to muzzle dissent at home but not to change tastes or attitudes that could give the world yet another pandemic after SARS and Covid-19.Covid-19, meanwhile, has cast an unflattering light on the only institution tasked with providing global health leadership, the World Health Organization (WHO). — Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April … I woke up this morning to one of the strangest tweets ever. Since the start of the outbreak, more than 465,000 people have died, according to Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Infectious-disease specialists based in Hong Kong, in a study published in 2007 in an American journal, said the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-like ‘viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals,’ was a Chinese ‘time bomb’ that raised the ‘possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories.’In fact, just months before the Covid-19 outbreak in China, a biomedical study by four Chinese presciently warned that a new coronavirus will emanate from bats, with ‘an increased probability that this will occur in China.’ The Chinese hunger for the rare, exotic and dubiously curative has fostered wildlife farming, provided a cover for poaching and threatened to drive endangered animals to extinction.Videos showing Chinese wolfing down pangolins, wolf cubs, dogs, snakes, hedgehogs, civet cats or other animals not only contribute to China’s image problem but also underline the dangers of another deadly disease originating in that country.