WHO panel must look at every aspect of COVID-19

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark is right to regard her appointment as co-head of the World Health Organisation’s independent panel investigating the COVID-19 pandemic as “exceptionally challenging”. After seven years leading the UN Development Program and three terms as prime minister, Ms Clark has extensive experience of the wiles and, all too often, the cover-ups, corruption, wilful obfuscation and doublespeak of governments and global bureaucracies. Known as a tough political fighter, she will need to call on all those reserves if she and panel co-head Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Nobel Peace prize winner and former Liberian president, are to come close to fulfilling the fully justified demand initiated by Scott Morrison in March for a complete, transparent and independent probe. At the World Health Assembly in May the push for an inquiry won unanimous support — even, grudgingly, from a cornered China.

The significance of the inquiry and expectations attached to it cannot be overstated. At stake is the fundamental credibility of the WHO as the US has withdrawn from the world body, taking its substantial funding with it. So, too, is the credibility of the WHO’s controversial Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as well as that of China and its claims that, despite all that has happened, it is a responsible, law-abiding member of the international community that did all it could to stop the virus spreading. Amid the global devastation resulting from what emerged from Wuhan, the world wants answers. The panel led by Ms Clark and Ms Sirleaf must be unrelenting in getting them, however difficult it may prove to be trying to extract the truth from Dr Tedros, with his remarkably close links to Beijing, or China’s combative dictatorship.

The surge in cases across the globe, as the total number of infections soars past 13 million, with close to 600,000 deaths so far, underlines the urgency of the need for the panel to find out exactly what happened after the virus appeared in Wuhan and why it was able to spread like wildfire. Rightly, in Australia, we’re concerned about the current surge in Victoria. But our numbers remain thankfully small and need to be seen in perspective, with the US’s almost 3.5 million cases and 140,000 deaths so far, Brazil’s almost two million cases and 73,000 deaths, and India’s almost 900,000 cases and 24,000 deaths reflecting the unrelenting upward curve of the viral scourge and the continuing plight of much of the world.

Ms Clark has been wise at the outset to express wholehearted support for the Prime Minister’s initiative in calling for the investigation. That may not be what Beijing, in trying to dissemble and fend off any blame, wants to hear. But so be it. Without being pollyannish, Ms Clark was right to have said on Saturday that the aim of her panel must be “to stop the world from being blindsided again by a crisis like this”. Overwhelmingly, the challenge for her will be to overcome Beijing’s intransigence and persuade it that it is as much in China’s own best interests to get a clear-eyed, independent picture of the virus’s trajectory as it is in the interests of the rest of the world.

Beijing’s irrational, dog-in-the-manger response to Mr Morrison’s initial perfectly reasonable demand for the investigation makes even less sense now, in the light of events, than it did in March. If President Xi Jinping wants to see his country returned to any sort of respectability on the global stage, he must ensure that Ms Clark’s panel is given full and unfettered access to all aspects of the virus’s provenance, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the panel is to fulfil the WHA’s unanimous endorsement of the need for an independent inquiry, Dr Tedros must not be allowed to run interference over what the panel does and where it goes. The probe itself would have little credibility if it failed to put Wuhan firmly in the frame as the site of the pandemic’s origins in the city’s wet markets as well as claims about the Virology Institute. The panel’s investigation is an acid test for the WHO and China. Both have a last chance to ensure the world gets to know the truth about the devastating pandemic’s origins. Ms Clark has a pivotal role in ensuring that happens.