President Biden halted the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization on his first day in office. The premise of his decision is that reforming international institutions from within is more effective than leaving or retaining funds, and this theory will be tested quickly.
“China has total control over the World Health Organization,” Donald Trump said last year when he announced that the U.S. would leave. That was a typical hyperbole, but it had a point. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus defended China’s response to the virus – “very impressive and beyond words” – as Beijing destroyed virus samples, neutralized whistleblowers and spread conspiracy theories. .
WHO officials considered speaking in private, but calculated that the Chinese Communist Party would be even less cooperative if publicly criticized. The agency’s reluctance didn’t do much. A WHO team of experts headed to Beijing to study the origins of the virus in February 2020, when its chances of finding out how it was transferred to humans from animals were significantly better than at present, but the Chinese government prevented them.
Negotiations with Beijing lasted until 2020. This month, Dr. Tedros finally put together the spiritless complaint that he was “very disappointed” by the delays. The Chinese foreign ministry said it liked the presence of investigators shortly before the final days began to arrive. Think of it as seriously as OJ Simpson’s vow to make finding his ex-wife’s killer “my main goal in life”.
According to the media, Beijing pushed the WHO to delegate critical initial research work to Chinese scientists. The WHO team, at best, will get incomplete data, because research on the origins of Covid-19 cannot be published in China without the approval of the Communist Party. The Chinese government also approved the members and agenda of the WHO mission.