CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator Humor : Über Serious
| Subject: Sycophantic WHO Needs to Quit Being Polite With China Tue Feb 18, 2020 6:47 pm | |
| The coronavirus poses a global health risk that’s more important than appeasing a major donor to the agency.
In late January, the World Health Organization began offering to send an international team of experts to China to observe and help with the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. On Monday, that team of experts was finally allowed to start its investigations. The Chinese government, however, will not let them to visit epidemic-stricken Hubei Province or the city of Wuhan, the likely source of the virus now called Covid-19 and the site of the largest quarantine in history. According to one prominent Communist Party-controlled news outlet, Hubei is simply too busy and “cannot spare the time and people to receive the experts.” For weeks, the World Health Organization and its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have been under fire for a tepid and slowing-moving response to the deadly new virus — an approach that appears overly deferential to China’s political demands. Some of the criticism is unfair. The WHO cannot organize a response to a global health emergency if the country at its center won’t cooperate. But recent history shows that too much political deference in a health emergency is a global risk in its own right. The WHO is uniquely positioned to demand more from China. It needs to do so now.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-18/coronavirus-threat-means-who-should-demand-more-help-from-china |
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