How the World Health Organisation’s failure to challenge China over coronavirus cost us dearly

The international body blithely accepted Beijing’s assurances that there was little to worry about.

A photo taken on February 24, 2020 shows the logo of the World Health Organization (WHO) at their headquarters in Geneva. - Fears of a global coronavirus pandemic deepened on February 24, 2020 as new deaths and infections in Europe, the Middle East and Asia triggered more drastic efforts to stop people travelling. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

As the Japanese government counted the cost of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics being postponed to next year, Taro Aso, the country’s deputy prime minister, took out his frustration on the World Health Organisation (WHO). Preparation for a pandemic of exactly this nature had long been the WHO’s top priority. So why did it fail the test so badly when the moment came?

Aso’s answer was that the WHO had grown far too close to China. Indeed, he suggested, it should change its name to the Chinese Health Organisation. Not only was the previous WHO director-general, Margaret Chan, a Chinese national but her successor, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the former Ethiopian health minister, was China’s candidate. The allegation was serious: “Early on, if the WHO had not insisted to the world that China had no pneumonia epidemic, then everybody would have taken precautions,” he said on 28 March. Although it was alerted in late December that a new disease had appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the WHO continued to repeat Beijing’s assurances that there was nothing much to worry about.