A crisis mustn’t be allowed to let WHO lay us to waste
The Critic Magazine
Date: 8 May, 2020
By: Pieter Cleppe
The World Health Organisation (WHO), which is the public health agency of the United Nations, is in urgent need of more scrutiny. It’s one thing for European countries and Bill Gates, whose foundation is the second biggest funder of the WHO, to oppose Donald Trump’s decision to halt funding for the WHO. It’s yet another to look the other way when the case for fundamentally rethinking the WHO is made. Dislike of President Trump or other WHO critics should not blind us to the truth. Here are five facts about the WHO, highlighting how deep the problem runs.
1 WHO mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis not only put lives at risk but also caused severe economic harm
Despite being warned in late December that a new disease had appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the World Health Organisation continued to repeat China’s assurances that there was nothing much to worry about. On the 3 January, China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, while also telling labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. As Doctors who tried to warn the public had been punished, the Chinese authorities only announced the novel coronavirus outbreak on the 9 January.
It was Taiwan which had warned the WHO about the problem in Wuhan at the end of December, complaining that its concerns were not passed on to other countries. Taiwanese doctors had heard from mainland Chinese colleagues that medical staff were getting ill, which is a sign of human-to-human transmission. On 14 January, the WHO still tweeted that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”, even if apparently, behind the scenes, the body had been warning the United States and other countries a few days before, on 10 January, about the risk of human-to-human transmission. That’s still around two weeks after it had been warned by Taiwan.
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