WHO failed on pandemic, as new CIA finding shows

The CIA’s long-overdue conclusion that the Covid-19 pandemic that brought the world to its knees “most likely” emanated from a lab leak in Wuhan amplifies the significance of Donald Trump’s decision, in one of his first acts last week, to again pull the US out of the World Health Organisation. The disgraceful conduct of the WHO – particularly that of its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – in the early stages of the pandemic in 2019, and since, in genuflecting towards Chinese denials of responsibility remains one of the most shameful and damaging aspects of the outbreak. So does the WHO’s supine failure to back Scott Morrison’s perfectly sensible and entirely justified demand for a full, independent inquiry into the provenance of the pandemic – a demand that outraged Beijing. The WHO should have been in the vanguard of getting answers. Instead it kowtowed to China, and the fact the CIA has only now aligned itself with the FBI’s and US Energy Department’s longstanding apportionment of blame to China is likely a consequence of the WHO’s abysmal failure to do much to help get the answers needed from Beijing. The US President could not have been more correct, in announcing the US pullout, when he spoke of the WHO having grossly mishandled the pandemic “and other international crises”, and accused it of failing “to act independently from the political influences of member states”.

He criticised the WHO for helping China “mislead the world” over the origins of the virus. Mr Trump was right to pinpoint the blame for the travesty where it belongs. The WHO cannot escape the preponderance of blame for the mishandling of the outbreak, especially in its early stages in Wuhan when Beijing’s malfeasance and gross dissembling were so clearly apparent over a virus that has so far killed in excess of seven million people worldwide and continues to weigh heavily on the global economy. It may be, as a CIA spokesman said on Saturday, that, in formal terms, the agency will at this stage admit no more than it “assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting”. That is a quantum leap from its previous extreme caution when it would say no more than that it did not have enough information to assess whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or arose from a laboratory mishap. The significance of the CIA’s changed stance, belated though it may be, cannot be overstated.

Importantly, Mr Trump’s new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, sworn in last week, has long believed the lab leak theory is the far more plausible explanation. So, it appears, does Mr Trump. And that gives context to his decision to pull the US – far and away the biggest donor in terms of its budget – out of the WHO. Mr Trump left the WHO during his previous term, only to see Joe Biden foolishly reverse that decision on his first day in the White House in 2021 and again provide the major share of its budget – some 22 per cent of the total of $US6.8bn ($10.8bn) for 2024-25. Fears that Mr Trump’s pullout will seriously hamper the global work of the WHO in combating disease are understandable but as he said, the US under his new administration cannot allow itself to continue to be “ripped off” by the WHO. Hopefully the CIA’s dramatic change of stance after protracted analysis and consideration will impact even on the WHO. It should. Against the backdrop of its gross mishandling of the pandemic, Mr Trump is right to declare that under his leadership the US no longer wants to be a member of the WHO. He must be cautious, however, that in doing so he does not open the door even wider to Beijing’s malevolent influence and further misuse by the Chinese Communist Party of the globe’s most important health body.