James Morrow: Is the World Health Organisation being too gentle on China?
By suggesting any talk connecting coronavirus with its origins in China is racist, the WHO is in essence doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, writes James Morrow.
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According to the World Health Organisation, the greatest danger the world faces from the novel coronavirus, which swept out of Wuhan at the start of the year, is not a mortality rate which makes it many times more fatal than the flu.
Nor is it the economic dislocation that might come if world trade grinds to a halt, tipping the globe into recession – or worse.
No, the real danger is that a few jerks might be emboldened by the spread of coronavirus to be racist and insult or attack people of Asian appearance.
Speaking to the cameras earlier this week the WHO’s Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that “stigma is more dangerous than the virus itself … stigma is the most dangerous enemy”.
Or to put it another way, the WHO has seen the enemy – and it is us.
The WHO backed up Tedros’s address with a long Twitter thread warning that “words & language can perpetuate negative stereotypes or assumptions, strengthen false associations between (coronavirus and) other factors, create widespread fear, or dehumanise those who have the disease”, adding that we should not “attach locations or ethnicity to the disease, this is not a ‘Wuhan Virus’, ‘Chinese Virus’ or ‘Asian Virus’.”
Oh, and according to the WHO, we should also not “talk about people ‘infecting others’ or ‘spreading the virus’ as it implies intentional transmission (and) assigns blame”.
Instead, the WHO advises, we should “talk about people ‘acquiring’ or ‘contracting’” coronavirus.
On one level, this is exactly the sort of feel-centric public health we should expect from the WHO, which until this outbreak had mostly contented itself with noodling around holding conferences on climate change and pestering people about their sugar consumption.
But when you dig more deeply, this awareness campaign banality starts to look more sinister. Particularly when you examine some of the connections between Tedros, the WHO, and China.
Tedros’s home country of Ethiopia is by some accounts China’s third-largest foreign aid recipient, and he was reportedly backed in by Beijing when he won the post of director-general in 2017.
When Australia imposed its China travel bans, Tedros spoke out against them (saying at the time the move would create “fear and stigma”). Today, the bans are widely acknowledged as being a key reason why the virus has not spread further here.
And of course Tedros’s WHO refused to declare a global health emergency in January, content instead to let the gullible take Beijing’s word that everything was under control.
Now, in seeking to change the framing of the way we talk about coronavirus, Tedros’s WHO campaign looks to make a thoughtcrime out of any discussion of the virus’s apparent birth in China – deflecting the heavy blame that should attach to Xi Jinping’s government in Beijing for its behaviour throughout the crisis.
But while it is right and proper to note that the virus is not the fault of the Chinese people, there should be no doubt that its breakout was encouraged by the recklessness of the Chinese government.
China’s leaders deliberately hid their knowledge of the virus, humiliated the doctor who tried to raise the alarm, and has made a mockery of the sort of transparency necessary to fight a fast-moving epidemic.
And having let it get that far, they are now seeking praise for having constructed the sort of Orwellian superstate that then allowed them to virtually lock up tens of millions of people in their homes – as well as lock down the flow of information – as they got the virus under control.
Meanwhile, at least in Australia, there has been precious little of the sort of abuse Tedros appears worried about.
Aside from some anecdotal reports about patients idiotically refusing to see Chinese doctors in Melbourne, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find much coronavirus-related racism out on the streets.
But by suggesting that any talk connecting the novel coronavirus with its origins in China is racist the WHO is in essence doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party, which has seen its ambitions to become the world’s dominant superpower by the middle of this century suffer a body blow as a result of this crisis.
The end result is that rather than being able to call out China’s weird, secretive, and oppressive government as one of the main drivers for coronavirus getting out of control, the WHO is instead encouraging us to think of coronavirus as just an event like the weather, appearing out of nowhere and moving like the wind.
And, all the while suggesting that it was only thanks to China’s weird, secretive, and oppressive tactics that the communist mainland government was able to get it under control in that country.
Recall that in January, Tedros praised Beijing’s response, rather than condemning it, saying “the Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak … (China has set) a new standard.”
Given some of the footage that has come out of China should be pretty scary to anyone outside the Chinese politburo.
By rewriting history as it happens, with the help of supposedly respectable bodies like the WHO, China is seeking to silence critics of its handling of the virus while making the claim that in a globalised world people should accept its style of totalitarian governance as the price of everlasting health and safety.
James Morrow is the Opinion Editor of The Daily Telegraph.