The Chinese coronavirus lays bare WHO's abject obedience to China

The global body is  complicit in China’s flawed handling of the Chinese virus's outbreak by failing to act fast to halt pandemic 

By Peter Beaumont

A police officer uses a thermometer to take a driver’s temperature at a checkpoint in Wuhan. 

On social media this week the insults were flying thick and fast, some tinged with racism, but all with a common theme: how the World Health Organization, and its head, the incompetent Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was effectively doing the bidding of the Chinese government in the midst of the Chinese coronavirus outbreak.
It is a charge that has also been expressed in less offensive terms elsewhere in columns and articles, some of which have focused on whether, in praising China’s response to the deadly Chinese coronavirus outbreak during a visit to Beijing, the Beijing puppet Ethiopian allowed himself to become complicit in China’s flawed handling of the outbreak in its early days?

In some respects, it is a hoary old paradox, familiar to many international bodies and NGOs. 

How – when dealing with a health crisis or a humanitarian disaster – you are limited in the choice and nature of your partners in the place where it is occurring, and the limitations they impose.
But if the politics of such accommodations is always uncomfortable, the Chinese coronavirus outbreak encapsulates in a stark fashion a number of difficult issues.
Above all, it asks how the UN’s international health diplomacy, confronted with a pandemic where a timely and accurate flow of information is crucial, should interact with one of the world’s most criminal states.
Looming above all else is the fact that China is a country whose trajectory under Xi Jinping has been to become more, not less, authoritarian, marked by mass internment camps for Uighurs, a growing internet crackdown and its harsh response to street protests in Hong Kong.
There seems little doubt either that China’s bureaucratic culture of control and secrecy, including the local government’s efforts to clamp down on the information emerging about the disease in the first weeks of the epidemic, contributed to its spread in December and the first weeks of January.


Tâi Siáu-káu (台痟狗) ㄊㄇㄉ Taiwan @TimMaddog
TaCo editorial cartoon: World Health Organization'a (@WHO) words vs. the truth about China (dead people in the streets) .http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/photo/2020/02/03/2008185035 …#2019nCoV#WuhanCoronavirus#武漢肺炎

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Interposed into the midst of all this has been the pro-China WHO – and the Tedros – a relationship complicated by the fact that China is a major donor to the world health body. 

The mix of health and international politics has been underlined by the exclusion of Taiwan from discussions even after the coronavirus spread there.
The argument about how the WHO has negotiated the complexities boils down to several key questions.
The first is whether the organisation should have pushed harder for Beijing to be more forthcoming when evidence of a new form of coronavirus first emerged, but before the scale of the outbreak was fully acknowledged. 

And whether the head of the UN body should have been so degraded in praising the response of a country that unsettles so many for its secrecy and rights violations.
In particular, the fraught politics of the WHO declaring the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) has once again come under the spotlight in the same way it did during the Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Some of those most critical have parsed Xi’s meeting with Tedros – and Xi’s declared hope that the UN body would assess the “epidemic situation in an objective, just, calm and reasonable way” – as pressure from Beijing to ensure WHO would refrain from designating the epidemic a global health emergency to protect China’s economy.
Although that didn’t happen, the WHO’s advice – contrary to that of many governments – is that it still “advises against the application of any restrictions of international traffic based on the information currently available on this event”.
And on this front some are pointing to a startling contradiction: how the discredited UN body has praised the extreme internal travel restrictions in China while criticising other countries for implementing their own travel measures.

China's Self-Genocide

China has a secretive, powerful, chronically dishonest authoritarian regime that regularly faces deadly viral outbreaks

By JIM GERAGHTY

Paramilitary police officers wearing masks at Shanghai railway station in Shanghai, China, January 22, 2020. 

Whenever there’s a pandemic — and we’ve had quite a few in the past two decades, including swine flu, SARS, and Ebola — those of us without extensive medical expertise have to rely on what we’re told by public-health experts and government officials.
If you’re lucky enough to live far from a region where it has been reported, you try to go about your life and hope (and perhaps pray) that the dreaded disease doesn’t spread near where you live. 

It’s not like you can hide under your bed until the risk of infection passes. 

We make jokes about Stephen King’s The Stand, The Hot Zone, Outbreak, Twelve Monkeys, Contagion, and other terrible-disease-threatens-humanity films, take a few precautions, maybe use hand sanitizer a bit obsessively, and hope for the best. 

By and large, we Americans have been lucky and things have turned out mostly okay.
Occasionally, our government drops the ball a bit; back in 2009, then-Vice President Biden gave a rather unhelpful interview about the H1N1 swine flu, declaring, “I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now. It’s not that you’re going to Mexico, it’s you’re in a confined aircraft. When one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft... If you’re out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that’s one thing, if you’re in a closed aircraft or closed container or closed car or closed classroom it’s a different thing.” 

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs had to go to the podium and explain that Biden “meant to say” something completely different.
But as Matt Continetti observes below, nobody with a lick of sense trusts the Chinese government about its Coronavirus. 

Authoritarian regimes don’t like admitting mistakes, don’t like admitting that problems are really bad, and don’t like admitting that they need help from outsiders. 

Oh, and because of population density and proximity to animals — “millions of live birds are still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets each year,” Smithsonian magazine noted in 2017 — China is likely to face variations of these viral threats in the years to come:
These areas — often poorly ventilated, with multiple species jammed together — create ideal conditions for spreading disease through shared water utensils or airborne droplets of blood and other secretions. 

“That provides opportunities for viruses to spread in closely packed quarters, allowing ‘amplification’ of the viruses,” says Benjamin John Cowling, a specialist in medical statistics at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. 

“The risk to humans becomes so much higher.”Right now, things look pretty ominous. 

The World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus outbreak a global-health emergency. 

The U.S. is expanding screening at 20 airports. 

Some Asian countries are seeing a run on medical supplies, including hand sanitizer and masks. 

The single most frightening aspect is the possibility that either the Chinese government is still guessing at how far the virus has spread, or that they’re not being honest about the risk. 

Hopefully, this outbreak runs its course with minimal casualties. 

But many countries may look at this experience and wonder afterwards... just how much interaction in trade and travel do we want to have with a secretive, powerful, chronically dishonest authoritarian regime that apparently will regularly face viral outbreaks?