World Health Organization officials dismissed U.S. complaints that the international agency amplified false information from China and opposed initial efforts to contain the coronavirus one day after President Trump froze U.S. aid to the organization.
“In the first weeks of January, WHO was very, very clear,” WHO Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director Michael Ryan told reporters. “We alerted the world on January the fifth. Systems around the world, including the U.S., began to activate their incident management systems on January the sixth. And through the next number of weeks, we’ve produced multiple updates to countries, including briefing multiple governments, multiple scientists around the world, on the developing situation. And that is what it was: a developing situation.”
WHO officials have been dogged by allegations that they helped China cover up the full extent of the novel coronavirus outbreak before the contagion developed into a global pandemic, a suspicion that has driven sharp criticisms from the United States and Taiwan. Those complaints have centered on a WHO tweet that lent credence to China’s claim that the virus wasn’t spreading rapidly between humans and the invocation of WHO guidance as Chinese diplomats pressured countries not to suspend travel to China.
“The WHO pushed China’s misinformation about the virus, saying it was not communicable and there was no need for travel bans,” Trump told reporters Tuesday evening. “They told us when we put on our travel ban, a very strong travel ban — there was no need to do it. ‘Don’t do it.’ They actually fought us. The WHO’s reliance on China’s disclosures likely caused a twentyfold increase in cases worldwide, and it may be much more than that.”
Trump, who announced a freeze on U.S. aid to the international organization, demanded that the WHO give “a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes.” WHO officials emphasized Wednesday that a proper accounting can only take place through an “after-action report” following the containment of the virus.
“We will be examining all of the actions taken by everybody in this, so in that sense, the idea of having a defense at this point seems rather strange,” Ryan said.
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Still, the senior leadership of the WHO denied downplaying the potential spread of the disease between humans. Ryan argued that their initial guidance “was extremely clear that respiratory precautions should be taken in dealing with patients with this disease,” but he maintained that it was more difficult to learn whether the virus was racing through communities outside of hospital wards or other closed settings.
“The determination was: Was the virus spreading efficiently at community level outside those environments?” Ryan said. “And that is not an easy determination to make. And one has to make that very carefully. So, from that perspective, we’ll be very happy when the after-action reviews happen.”
Ryan also sidestepped Trump’s rebuke about the WHO’s position on travel restrictions. “WHO does not control the law on this,” he said of the travel restrictions.
“WHO’s only function … is to challenge member states who put in place restrictions to ensure that they have a public health justification for imposing those restrictions and that we are bound then to share those justifications with other countries who may be affected by those flight restrictions.”
Yet, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that travel restrictions could backfire just a few days after the Jan. 31 U.S. announcement curtailing flights from China to the U.S.
“Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma with little public health benefit,” Tedros said on Feb. 5.
China’s envoy to the United Nations in Geneva agreed, arguing alongside Tedros that such policies were an “overreaction” that could “lead to more complicated outcomes and interfere with prevention and control efforts.”
Ryan promised to study all their decisions. “In fact, I am very anxious for those after-action reviews to come because we do them for every outbreak response,” he said. “I’ll be delighted with our teams and look forward to that engagement to look and see where we can do better and where we can improve our response.”
