World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is increasingly being held to account for his organization’s stumbles at the outset of the coronavirus epidemic as critics around the world home in on his alleged collusion with China’s dishonesty about the outbreak.
“This DG has made his position pretty clear and his alliances pretty clear,” Taiwanese diplomat Vincent Chao said Thursday.
Chao, a senior official in Taiwan’s de facto embassy to the United States, made that jab while discussing the expectation that Tedros will fight Taiwan’s bid to participate in the World Health Assembly in 2020. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and opposes any recognition of the island as a separate nation.
“Geneva was, like, vegetative,” an Asian official said of the WHO’s “disappointing” response to the emergence of the dangerous new virus in China. “There are many criticisms [related to] WHO’s incompetence during [the] COVID situation.”
That’s true even among European governments inclined to work closely with Tedros. “When you get away from the official positions and you’re talking about informal perceptions, there is an informal perception that the WHO covered up for China,” Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and special envoy for Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner. “There is a perception that’s pretty widespread.”
The controversy over the WHO’s response springs in part from the tension between China and Taiwan, the island where the remnants of the government overthrown during the Chinese Communist Revolution have taken refuge since 1949. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and tries to prevent countries and United Nations entities from working with Taiwanese officials.
So, when Taiwanese officials reported their concern to Geneva that the new coronavirus was spreading between humans in late December, Tedros’s team did not circulate that warning to WHO member states. WHO officials proceeded to echo China’s claims that “preliminary investigations” didn’t support that suspicion.
“The problem is not the WHO system. The system has good people,” a senior Trump administration official said. “It’s about comments made from the leadership — which went beyond what I am told their own staff wanted to say.”
That failing spurred President Trump to describe the organization as “China-centric” and threaten to withhold American funding from the WHO. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro added Thursday that China has installed “colonial-type proxies like Tedros” at various U.N. agencies.
The rebukes are getting under Tedros’s skin. The normally staid WHO chief responded to Trump’s barb by warning world leaders to “behave” and avoid political feuding on Wednesday. Then, he accused Taiwan of condoning a racist social media campaign against him.
“They didn’t disassociate themselves,” he told reporters Wednesday. “They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur, but I didn’t care.”
Chinese officials, for their part, defended Tedros from Trump’s barbs. “The World Health Organization, under the leadership of Dr. Tedros, has been earnestly fulfilling its duties, upholding an objective, scientific, and fair stance and playing an important role in coordinating international efforts and advancing international cooperation in response to the pandemic,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen turned the racism charge back on Tedros by inviting him to observe Taipei’s response to the coronavirus in person — a trip he can’t make without drawing the ire of Beijing.
“For years, we have been excluded from international organizations, and we know better than anyone else what it feels like to be discriminated against and isolated,” she said Wednesday, according to a translation provided by Taiwanese officials.
“If Director-General Tedros could withstand pressure from China and come to Taiwan to see Taiwan’s efforts to fight COVID-19 for himself, he would be able to see that the Taiwanese people are the true victims of unfair treatment.”
