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With the development of the coronavirus pandemic in Western Europe and the United States, more and more questions have arisen about China’s behavior in the first weeks of infection, and from there the doubts are transferred to the World Health Organization ( WHO). Has the UN health authority been silent about the disease and the dangers that surround it, and has it been under pressure from the Chinese government?
According to research by Der Spiegel, the answer to both questions is “Yes”. Furthermore, the material released by the publication this weekend claims that President Xi Jinping had a personal conversation with WHO Director-General Tedros Gebreyesus.
Spiegel quotes a phone call provided by Germany’s federal intelligence services, citing a disturbing dialogue in which Jinping asked the health organization to “delay” the announcement of the COVID-19 epidemic.
In addition, the WHO, in the person of Gebreyesus, asked the Chinese president to refrain from mentioning that the virus is transmitted from person to person.
The conversation, according to German intelligence, took place on January 21, more than a week before the health authority announced the infection, and two weeks before giving it its official name: COVID-19. Such a delay, under pressure from the Chinese authorities, may have been decisive for the West in its battle against the coronavirus. According to Spiegel, the rest of the world has lost the precious four to six weeks that could have completely changed the course of the pandemic.
Already this Monday, the World Health Organization issued an official refutation of the accusations made in the German magazine. According to the WHO, “Dr. Gebreyesus and President Si have never spoken on the phone,” and that misinformation diverts attention from the organization’s activities and the world’s efforts to deal with the pandemic.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry also categorically denies that the health authority has been pressured and forced to hide information about COVID-19. He posted a 30-page article on his website, denying all of those set out in Spiegel’s article. The Foreign Ministry also clarified that the submission of data to the WHO for the new coronavirus strain was “completely timely” and subject to full transparency.
Tedros Gebreyesus meets with President Xi Jinping
The ministry even quoted the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, saying that “you can lie to the entire nation for a time, but you cannot lie to the entire nation all the time.”
However, suspicions remain that the World Health Organization has deliberately or negligently delayed the release of the coronavirus.
The allegations come from the White House and Donald Trump, who described the WHO as “China-centered” and threatened to cut US funds from the health authority. Trump confidently stated that “they [от СЗО] they certainly knew more than they told the world “in January, and since then almost any information coming from the UN health authority is completely false. The president concluded by saying that he no longer has confidence in the WHO and that the United States it does not have to tolerate such behavior within the United Nations.
Alarming evidence that the World Health Organization has been hiding coronavirus data also comes from Taiwan. In April, Taipei made public emails in which on December 31 it attempted to warn the WHO of the danger of infection. In an online communication, Taiwanese doctors reported that “at least nine cases of SARS” had been reported in Wuhan, where COVID-19 originated.
Chinese authorities at the time only said that these patients were not infected with SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome, which is also caused by a coronavirus strain) and that the investigation was still ongoing. They are convinced that all cases of the disease have been successfully isolated and treated, and they also have serious doubts that the disease is transmitted from person to person.
Despite this apparent reassurance, Taiwan is trying to inform the WHO that something unusual is happening in Wuhan and is asking the health organization to send teams to the site to check if the new disease, hitherto unknown, is transmitted from person to person. However, the health authority refuses to send specialists to the Chinese metropolises and ignores even troubling details such as the term “atypical pneumonia,” a phrase that Chinese doctors often call SARS.
Another worrying point in the information provided by China is that patients are “isolated for treatment”.
The question immediately arises: If it is not a highly contagious and dangerous disease that is easily transmitted by droplets in the air from one patient to another, then why are patients isolated from it? China quickly emphasizes that the virus is not SARS? Taipei, on the other hand, accuses the WHO of doing next to nothing despite the warnings, does not send teams to the scene, and therefore shows criminal negligence towards the infection, which later turned into a pandemic.
Wuhan Field Hospital
The course of events after the inaction of the World Health Organization is already clear to everyone: in January it was shown that a new strain of the coronavirus family had been introduced in Wuhan and that it was extremely easy to transmit by droplets in the air. As of February 21, there were 47 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Europe, and the number of those infected was growing like an avalanche.
Didn’t the western world have the opportunity to react faster and more appropriately to the danger of COVID-19, if it knew what was coming?
There is no way to be completely sure. According to Der Spiegel, if Europe had been informed of the details of the coronavirus, a pandemic of this magnitude would have been avoided with early but unpopular measures, such as closing the borders and quarantining citizens arriving from certain countries.
However, the World Health Organization insists that a comprehensive epidemic of COVID-19 was completely unavoidable, and now the number one goal is not to delve into the past, but to focus on the present and tackle the disease.
