The former head of the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service said the Chinese government and the World Health Organization bear responsibility for a flawed response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Sir Robert John Sawers, who was chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, from 2009 through 2014, told BBC Radio on Wednesday the Chinese Communist Party is “evading” its responsibility for the current global pandemic. He also said the WHO has “serious questions to answer.”
Sawers, who was also the former British permanent representative to the United Nations from 2007 through 2009, warned that China has been moving toward becoming a surveillance state for years, especially under the half-decade of leadership of Xi Jinping, and that it has increased its influence over the United Nations.
“There is deep anger in America at what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China, and China is evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus and for failing to deal with it originally, initially,” Sawers said, adding: “It’s going to be a complicated, complex set of issues we’re going to have to deal with, and the world will not be the same after the virus as it was before.”
The British intelligence community has signaled they will recommend the U.K. take a tougher line toward China in the wake of the pandemic. The U.S. intelligence community suspects that China misled about the initial coronavirus outbreak and continues to lie about its cases and death toll.
The former MI6 leader argued, “It would be better to hold China responsible for those issues rather than the World Health Organization” because the WHO is “only as good as its member states.” He also lamented that China’s role at the U.N. has “steadily grown as China’s power has grown,” and noted that “heads of U.N. agencies are wary of offending one of the major powers.”
Still, Sawers said, “That doesn’t excuse the head of the WHO for failing to stand up for the facts and the data and making the right demands of the Chinese.”
“The WHO has got serious questions to answer about its performance,” he said, even as he acknowledged any “anger should be directed toward China rather than the WHO.”
President Trump announced on Tuesday that he was halting funding to the WHO while a review was conducted to assess its role in “severely mismanaging and covering up” the coronavirus.
“The WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts,” Trump said. “There was credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate and investigate immediately. Through the middle of January it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human transmission happening despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday ”we regret” Trump’s decision to halt funding. Tedros has repeatedly praised China’s response, including after a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in late January.
WHO Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director Michael Ryan defended the WHO’s response, telling reporters that “in the first weeks of January, WHO was very, very clear” about the danger posed by the coronavirus.
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the existence and the spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the World Health Organization, and attempted to block outside health experts. At least one study indicated that, if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
Reports showed Chinese doctors knew in about late December and early January that human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus was almost certainly happening, yet the WHO tweeted on Jan. 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, told The View on Wednesday that an autopsy of sorts would need to be conducted after the pandemic to assess how transparent China and the WHO were early on in the outbreak.
“I think once this is over, we’ll be able to look back and see did China and the WHO say and do everything to alert the rest of the world to the nuances of this virus. Because when it first explodes, someone had to have known that there was human-to-human transmission,” Birx said. “I see how this has moved through the United States, and I can see how you can go from one or two cases to hundreds of cases in a high, high doubling rate … That’s not subtle, and so you really have to go back and ask yourself why wasn’t there this level of transparency when this exploded.”
Birx said that people would have prepared differently from the outset if they had known the level of transmissibility of this virus.
Sawers also weighed in on what role better intelligence could have played in detecting any evasions by Beijing.
“Intelligence is about acquiring information which has been concealed from you by other states and other actors. There was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese were indeed concealing this from the West,” the former top U.K. spy said. “I think the need to build up our resilience and our preparedness for a pandemic means doing things on a national level … but also doing more on the international level.”
