Canberra vindicated on coronavirus inquiry

The joke is on Beijing’s envoy Cheng Jingye after unanimous approval by the WHO’s 194-nation World Health Assembly on Tuesday of an “impartial, independent and comprehensive” evaluation of the international response to coronavirus. Never before in the 72 years since the World Health Organisation was founded has a WHA motion attracted so many co-sponsor signatories — 137. In the early stages of lobbying by Australia and the EU for support for the motion establishing the inquiry at the “earliest appropriate moment”, even countries with particularly close ties to Beijing, including Russia and South Africa, jumped on board. There can be no surprise about that. COVID-19 has devastated nations large and small, with the number of cases at almost five million and nearly 325,000 deaths.

After fighting tooth and nail for weeks against any inquiry, China was isolated at the WHA. Even a personal appearance by President Xi Jinping on Monday didn’t alter the facts: a world shattered by a virus that emerged from Wuhan had turned against Beijing. China’s drive to thwart an inquiry was facing ignominious defeat. So it did a volte-face and signed up with the cosignatories supporting the motion. Yet Mr Cheng and his purblind “Wolf Warrior” colleagues at Beijing’s voluble foreign ministry would have us believe that the motion was “a joke”. No amount of boorish dissembling by Mr Cheng can disguise the reality, as Greg Sheridan concluded, that “Beijing has suffered an acute diplomatic defeat”. Australia, as Scott Morrison repeatedly emphasised, wanted no more than a proper scientific inquiry that would help ensure the world is not faced with a similar pandemic in the future. That the Prime Minister was representing global opinion was clear from the emphatic support for the inquiry proposal, first suggested by us and then adopted by the EU, at the WHA.

It may be, as some have noted, that the motion did not mention China by name, something Washington was keen to see. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian insisted on Wednesday that “the draft resolution is entirely different from what Australia called ‘(an) independent international review’ ”. The inquiry would be “no more than an evaluation of experience gained and lessons learned from the WHO-­­co-ordinated health response, rather than an inquiry based on the presumption of guilt targeting a certain country”. Mr Zhao, like Mr Cheng, appears to have no understanding of the process of drafting resolutions at international gatherings. Even the WHO’s China-friendly director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus emphasised in a tweet the inquiry will include but “will not be limited to” the WHO. Significantly, key aspects of the motion include an investigation into the source of the virus and its transfer to humans and the need to enter China to determine the pandemic’s origins.

Dr Tedros, as he is known, has a clear responsibility to give effect to the unanimous WHA decision by ensuring an inquiry is established without delay. Foreign Minister Marise Payne has pointed out that there are a number of bodies within the structures of the WHO and outside it, including an independent oversight committee, that could conduct an investigation. The WHA motion fully vindicates the Morrison government’s initiative in seeking to establish the truth about COVID-19. A deeply anxious world has shown it wants answers, not more obfuscation from Beijing.