World Health Organization officials who praised China’s transparency regarding the novel coronavirus could face the klieg lights in an international investigation into the mishandling of the pandemic, despite Beijing’s attempt to shape the investigation.
“The WHO needs to be reformed. The WHO committed mistakes,” a senior European diplomat said. “They were much too much inclined at the early stage to suck up to China,” the diplomat said. “And that may have prevented transparency that was necessary early on.”
That perception of the premier global health agency has grown throughout the coronavirus pandemic, along with anger at Chinese communist censorship of the doctors and dissidents who tried to provide early warnings. China’s involvement in crafting the plan to investigate the crisis has fed American suspicions that the cover-up is bound to continue, but Western diplomats and analysts maintain that Beijing won’t be able to protect WHO leaders in Geneva.
“The inquiry needs to look into the WHO as well,” the senior European diplomat said. “It’s not only about China, it’s also about the WHO.”
Given what’s at stake for the WHO and China, Beijing’s backing of the resolution that authorizes an investigation stokes doubts about the integrity of the inquiry. But European officials cautioned against overstating the significance of China’s diplomatic wins in the earliest phase of planning the investigation.
“You have to make sure that the right people get appointed to do the investigation, not just the right body,” a second senior European diplomat said. “If we get it right, there’s a good chance it will do a proper investigation.”
World powers agreed to launch the inquiry at the World Health Assembly in May when Chinese officials succeeded in blocking Taiwan from gaining observer status at the forum. European officials worked with China to draft a resolution calling for an investigation, leading to a compromise that contained milder language than the tone favored by Australia and other countries most openly angry over China’s mishandling of the pandemic.
“It’s very clear that, despite the widespread dissatisfaction with the WHO and everything else, some of the key players that should be standing up, like some of the Europeans, are not doing that,” the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano said. “They just basically cut the rug out from under Australia at the WHO.”
Those apparent diplomatic victories for China formed a backdrop for President Trump’s decision to announce that he would terminate the U.S. relationship with the WHO, but the details of the health agency leadership’s accommodation of China are still coming to light. Newly revealed audio recordings feature senior WHO leaders expressing private frustration with China’s refusal to share information about the burgeoning health crisis, in contrast to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s public praise for Beijing’s putative transparency.
“We’re going on very minimal information,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an American epidemiologist who works as the WHO’s technical lead for the coronavirus pandemic, said during an internal meeting in early January. “It’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning.”
The contrast between such private grumbling and the willingness of Tedros to express gratitude to China for “the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated” is fueling calls for heads to roll at the U.N. body. Even if that deferential public posture was an attempt to convince China to provide more information, an international health policy analyst said, Tedros should still be ousted.
“Even if you put the best gloss on that … he should resign,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Roger Bates said of Tedros. “He wasn’t transparent. And he did help the Chinese cover things up, even if that wasn’t his intention.”
Chinese officials dismissed the reported recordings as having “no truth” to them and continued to tout their own actions and praise the WHO. “We have been in close and good communication and cooperation with WHO and its office in China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday. “We will continue to support WHO in leading the global fight against the virus with concrete actions and work with the larger international community to uphold global public health security.”
