Why Modi, Trump and others are angry at WHO’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis

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New Delhi: The World Health Organization (WHO), the agency that deals with health within the United Nations, faces many critics worldwide, and even in India, on how it has managed this crisis. Covid-19. It seems to have taken too long to respond to the pandemic and has given China a long pass.

He long denied that the coronavirus was a pandemic and, in fact, it even took too long to accept that human-to-human transmission of the virus was possible. He had given complimentary certificates of good conduct to China until the end of January. The WHO criticized countries, including the United States, for imposing travel bans on China.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi questioned the WHO in a diplomatic manner on Thursday at the G20 virtual summit. In fact, he suggested that WHO now needs an overhaul. He said it appears that WHO does not have the kind of power necessary to manage global Covid-19 pandemics. He also wanted WHO to be empowered to issue early warnings as well as build capacity and work on vaccines. He also said that he had been caught up in the last century.

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WHO balances powers

The previous century was very different because it was the century of the cold war that followed the world war when the United Nations was formed. WHO has been balanced between the United States and Russia. The world became unipolar after the end of the Cold War. Now, the unipolar has become a bipolar world, with the rise of China. One of the poles, which was the main pole or pivot on which the world stood after the Cold War, has now shrunk. It’s Trump’s America or America under Trump.

If Modi was diplomatic in her criticism of the WHO, others were not.

Trump himself said that the WHO had become unilateral with China and that it was unfair. Marco Rubio, who was the former nomination candidate for the Republican party, said there were several red flags in the relationship of WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with China.

Another senior Republican senator, Michael McCaul, who is a prominent member of the Foreign Relations Committee, endorsed the allegation. Then Congressman Greg Steube, also from the Republican Party, said that under Tedros, the WHO had become the spokesperson for China.

Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, said the same thing. Arguably, they are all senators and members of the Congress of the Republican Party, but they all attack Tedros and the WHO so firmly on the same issue. That the WHO has been weak and incompetent and ineffective in dealing with this crisis, that it has also caused the world to fail, and that it has been too weak to deal with China.

Lawrence O. Gostin, a leading global health expert who is also an informal adviser to contending candidate for the Director-General of WHO Director-General Dr David Nabarro, has accused Tedros of covering up to three epidemics cholera in his country of origin, Ethiopia, when he was the Minister of Health. Gostin drew attention to Ethiopia’s long history of denying the cholera epidemics even though aid agencies have tried to contain them. Dr. Tedros is a compassionate and highly skilled public health official, said Gostin. But he had a duty to speak the truth to those in power and to identify and honestly report cholera epidemics that had been verified over a long period.

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Also read: 6 steps each country should take now to fight coronavirus: WHO

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Rise of China

So what happened in the past with WHO in similar situations in 2000, when three SARS outbreaks took place. When the SARS epidemic took place, the head of WHO was Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland. She had been Prime Minister of Norway three times, still a solid person. She resisted China. Now, in fact, she was very critical of China. She called on China not to act quickly enough and under it, WHO called China for viruses from the wildlife trade. China then sacked its health minister and the mayor of Beijing.

The equation of power in the world has changed today. China has risen and the agencies do not want to upset it today. The WHO has only praised China so far. Tedros went to China and found nothing wrong. On January 14, WHO declared that there was no human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus. Chinese epidemiologist Zhung Nanshan said on January 20 that human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus was possible. Tedros then went to China. In China, he met Xi Jinping and made his statement again, congratulating the Chinese on being remarkably quick to catch the virus.

Watch the full episode of CTC here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

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