China has pledged $30 million to the World Health Organization in a display of solidarity with the agency that U.S. officials believe abetted Beijing’s cover-up of the emerging coronavirus threat.
“Our donations demonstrate the Chinese government and people’s support for and trust in the WHO,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Thursday.
The pledge underscores how the WHO has developed into a lightning rod for the global rivalry between the United States and China, a rivalry that has worsened during the pandemic. WHO leaders opposed U.S. travel restrictions for China and lent credence to Chinese officials who minimized the danger posed by the pandemic, which prompted President Trump to freeze funding for the global health body.
“As the global fight against the pandemic enters a crucial stage, supporting the WHO is defending the ideals and principles of multilateralism and upholding the status and authority of the United Nations,” Geng said, emphasizing that WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been “upholding an objective, scientific, and impartial stance” on the pandemic.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo disagreed, arguing that WHO officials have allowed China to flout the International Health Regulations that bind all WHO member-states.
“We strongly believe that the Chinese Communist Party did not report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Not making a legal determination here today on China’s adherence to the IHRs, but the World Health Organization’s regulatory arm clearly failed during this pandemic.”
Pompeo paired that rebuke with an announcement that the U.S. will allocate $270 million “to assist the most at-risk countries in fighting the virus, bringing our total to more than $775 million to date,” but that funding will not pass through WHO hands, as the top diplomat’s lieutenants explained.
“So, our assistance to countries around the world is going to move forward,” State Department director of foreign assistance Jim Richardson told reporters. “And so, for every contract or every dollar flowing today, we’re just taking WHO off the table, and we’re going to provide that assistance to these other organizations in order to get the job done.”
China is framing the new donation as a sign of its commitment to global health and the international system. “As the global fight against the pandemic enters a crucial stage, supporting the WHO is defending the ideals and principles of multilateralism and upholding the status and authority of the United Nations,” Geng said.
