Nations must back coronavirus inquiry

As China is lobbying hard against it, there is no certainty the 62-nation coalition that has come together to back Scott Morrison’s call for an inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic will get the support it needs at the virtual meeting of the World Health Organisation’s “parliament”, the 194-nation World Health Assembly, on Tuesday. Given the remarkable breadth of the coalition, with even Russia — where the caseload is rising fast — backing a motion to effect an inquiry, Beijing would be making a bad mistake if it failed to recognise the depth of feeling across the world about how the pandemic emerged in Wuhan and how it was mishandled by the WHO.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, from Spain, who has played a crucial role in mobilising support for Mr Morrison’s call, is correct when he says the assembly should not be “a time for blame games and mutual reproach … it is not the moment to reproach anybody but instead to join forces against a problem that is everyone’s. If we don’t solve it everywhere, we won’t solve it anywhere”. All 27 EU nations, as well as countries as disparate as the UK, Japan, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey, in addition to Russia, have all been profoundly affected by COVID-19. And in backing the motion, all are determined to seek and find answers to a crisis that by Sunday involved more than 4.6 million cases of the virus and 312,000 deaths. Economies around the globe have been shattered.

Beijing may be in its usual state of frenetic high dudgeon about the prospect of an unwanted inquiry. But, as Mr Borrell said, China should also have a vital interest in learning more about the origin of this disease to prevent the next pandemic, because it is not going to be the last.

The lengthy motion drawn up by the EU, in consultation with Australia, demands the WHO’s director-general, Ethiopian Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, a shameless Beijing toady, “initiate at the earliest appropriate moment … a stepwise process of impartial and comprehensive evaluation” of the international response to the pandemic, and the actions of the WHO and its “timeline” in dealing with it.

There is nothing remarkable about that, as the Prime Minister reiterated on Friday. The motion, he said, is “not directed at anyone … all we want to know is what happened so it doesn’t happen again. It’s a pretty honest question with an honest intent and an honest motive.”

The motion does not refer specifically to the origins of COVID-19. But as Ben Packham reports on Monday, that is implicit. The reference to the WHO’s role in dealing with the crisis could go some way towards addressing criticism of the world body’s slowness in responding to the crisis, and its fawning praise for China, despite the CCP’s brutal silencing of Chinese medical whistleblowers.

There are important precedents for such an inquiry. In 2014, the WHO commissioned inquiries into the Ebola crisis in West Africa. In 2010, a review committee was convened to evaluate the response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic “and assess the level of global preparedness for similar events in the future”. That inquiry presciently concluded “the world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global and threatening public health emergency”. The COVID-19 crisis shows such apprehension was valid. All members of the World Health Assembly need to recognise that the virus is its most serious challenge since it was founded in 1948.