Coronavirus outbreak: WHO is no scapegoat; Trump is justified in freezing funds for China’s geopolitical instrument that did little to contain spread of the pandemic

The novel coronavirus could have been stopped in its tracks multiple times had the WHO shown a little more spine in standing up to China Donald Trump has decided to freeze funding for the World Health Organisation amid the raging pandemic, holding the UN body responsible for not only failing at its job but worse, “severely mismanaging” the crisis and colluding with China to launder Beijing’s sins of omission and commission. The WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has, on more than one occasion, warned nations against imposing travel bans on China that, according to him, increase “ fear and stigma, with little public health benefit”. As J Michael Cole of Canadian public policy think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute points out, “at a time when Taiwan was doing what WHO officials have been urging – international cooperation – Tedros was targeting the island-nation with potentially damaging disinformation provided by Beijing.” V. Other issues that expose WHO’s duplicity Writing in Bloomberg, columnist Eli Lake points out that Trump’s penal action against WHO came after the organisation refused to entertain a single request among a few put forward by the US — including Taiwan’s participation in World Health Assembly, pressing China to provide US public health agencies with the complete set of early samples of the virus, and providing greater transparency into how the virus initially spread within China. She was quoted by the newspaper, as saying: “Right from the start, from the first notification we received on the 31st of December, given that this was a cluster of pneumonia — I’m a MERS specialist, so my background is in coronaviruses and influenza — so immediately thought, given that this is a respiratory pathogen, that of course there may be human-to-human transmission.” Yet the WHO, at that stage, kept parroting China’s narrative despite evidence, advise and suggestions to the contrary.