Geneva: The World Health Organisation bowed to calls Monday from most of its member states to launch an independent probe into how it managed the international response to the coronavirus, which has been clouded by finger-pointing between the US and China over a pandemic that has killed over 300,000 people and levelled the global economy.
The comprehensive evaluation, “sought by a coalition of African, European and other countries, is intended to review” lessons learned from WHO’s coordination of the global response to COVID-19 but would stop short of looking into contentious issues such as the origins of the new coronavirus.
US President Donald Trump has claimed he has proof suggesting the coronavirus originated in a lab in China while the scientific community has insisted all evidence to date shows the virus likely jumped into humans from animals.
In Washington on Monday, Trump faulted WHO for having done a very sad job and said he was considering whether to cut the annual US funding from USD 450 million a year to USD 40 million.
They gave us a lot of bad advice, terrible advice, he said. “They were wrong so much, always on the side of China.”
Later Monday, Trump tweeted a letter he had sent WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
In the letter, Trump said the only way forward is if WHO can actually demonstrate independence from China.
Trump said that unless WHO commits to substantive improvements over the next 30 days, he will make a temporary suspension of US funding permanent.
WHO’s normally bureaucratic annual assembly this week has been overshadowed by mutual recriminations and political sniping between the US and China.
Trump has repeatedly attacked the WHO, claiming that it helped China conceal the extent of the coronavirus pandemic in its early stages.
Several Republican lawmakers have called on Tedros to resign.
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US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Monday it was time to be frank about “why COVID-19 has spun out of control.”
There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed and that failure cost many lives, Azar said.
Speaking hours after Chinese President Xi Jinping announced China would provide USD 2 billion to help respond to the outbreak and its economic fallout, Azar said the US had allocated USD 9 billion to coronavirus containment efforts around the world.
Women wearing face masks ride shared bicycles, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Beijing, China February 15, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Stringer
Tedros said he would launch an independent evaluation of WHO’s response at the earliest appropriate moment alluding to findings published Monday in a first report by an oversight advisory body commissioned to look into WHO’s response.
The 11-page report raised questions such as whether WHO’s warning system for alerting the world to outbreaks is adequate, and suggested member states might need to reassess WHO’s role in providing travel advice to countries.
In his opening remarks at the WHO meeting, Tedros held firm and sought to focus on the bigger troubles posed by the outbreak, saying we have been humbled by this very small microbe.
This contagion exposes the fault lines, inequalities, injustices and contradictions of our modern world,” Tedros said. “And geopolitical divisions have been thrown into sharp relief.
China, meanwhile, sought to divert attention to its renewed efforts to slow the coronavirus pandemic, with Xi announcing the USD 2 billion outlay over two years to fight it.
Last year, China donated about USD 86 million to WHO.
US National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot characterised China’s newly announced contribution as a token to distract from calls from a growing number of nations demanding accountability for the Chinese government’s failure to meet its obligations.
He said that since China was the source of the outbreak, it had a special responsibility to pay more and give more.
Xi insisted that China had acted with openness, transparency and responsibility” when the epidemic was detected in Wuhan.
He said China had given all relevant outbreak data to WHO and other countries, including the virus’s genetic sequence, in a most timely fashion.
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Xi said that in recent weeks, China has dispatched medical supplies to more than 50 African countries and that 46 Chinese medical teams were currently on the continent helping local officials.
Other world leaders including the presidents of France, South Korea and South Africa and Germany’s chancellor were also piped in to throw their support to the WHO, which has been put on the defensive from a Trump administration that has blamed it for mishandling the outbreak and showering excessive praise on China’s response. The European Union and others staked out a middle ground.
The Trump administration has claimed that WHO criticised a US travel ban that Trump ordered on people arriving from China.
Trump ordered a temporary suspension of funding for WHO from the US the health agency’s biggest single donor pending a review of its early response.
The advisory body, echoing comments from many countries, said such a review during the heat of the response could hurt WHO’s ability to respond to it.
Xi said China supports the idea of a comprehensive review of the global response to COVID-19 and that it should be “based on science and professionalism led by WHO, and conducted in an objective and impartial manner.