by N. Peter Kramer
The World Health Organisation is an institution that should be the vanguard of the global fight against the Corona virus but is failing. That is because it has been too focused on China! The end of December, Taiwanese officials, ignored by the WHO at China’s behest, sounded the alarm that the virus could be transmitted from human to human. Mid-January, under pressure from China, the WHO stated the opposite to be true. A declaration of a global pandemic then would have saved lives, but it took another week to announce an emergency on January 30.
The University of Southampton, UK, suggested that cases might have been reduced by 95 percent had China acted three weeks sooner. There has been no hint of it in gushing responses from the organisation and its director-general Dr Tedros. His only intervention in the crisis has been to visit China and blithely declare that he had been left in no doubt at all about the country’s capacity for transparency. Even when the declaration of a pandemic did come on March 11, Dr Tedros added that there was no need to limit trade or movement of people.
The exclusion of Taiwan from the WHO is a long-running problem. Not only the country, with 25 million inhabitants and situated only 180 km on the opposite side of China of the Taiwan Strait, doesn’t get the necessary information about the pandemic and how to handle it, but also the WHO let completely unused the generally acknowledged advanced medical expertise of Taiwan. Support for Taiwanese involvement has been voiced by inter alia the US, Canada, the EU, Japan, Germany but the WHO is adamant.
President Trump has threatened to withdraw, or at least reduce, American funding of the WHO, at present 22 percent of the budget. But an American withdrawal would make the situation worse by creating a larger space for China to step into. A better answer would be to reform and improve the organisation. The WHO needs to take its global mission seriously and political neutrality is a must.
