Coronavirus: we knew WHO got it wrong, says Greg Hunt

Australia was mystified as to why the World Health Organisation took so long to declare the coronavirus a disease of a pandemic proportions despite mounting evidence.

‘We could see that for some reason the WHO in Geneva was not declaring this as a disease of pandemic potential with the same urgency as Australia and some others’: Greg Hunt. Picture: AAP

Australia was mystified as to why the World Health Organisation took so long to declare the coronavirus a disease of pandemic proportions despite mounting evidence it was spiralling out of control, Health Minister Greg Hunt has revealed.

As pressure for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 builds, with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly throwing his weight behind calls for an international investigation, Mr Hunt has spoken about Australia’s puzzlement at the peak health body in the early stages of the crisis. Mr Hunt said as Australian health authorities sifted through information about the coronavirus, it was clear from mid-January it was spreading quickly among humans.

“We could see that for some reason the WHO in Geneva was not declaring this as a disease of pandemic potential with the same urgency as Australia and some others,’’ he told The Weekend Australian. “There was no clear explanation why Geneva was delaying a similar declaration to that which Australia made.’’

The Morrison government labelled it a pandemic — usually defined as the worldwide spread of a new disease — on February 27, nearly two weeks before the WHO did. The delay sparked criticism the global health body was beholden to China, which was seeking to downplay the virus spread.

Mr Hunt’s remarks came as former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese said China’s tardiness in owning up to the scale of the problem contributed to its severity. “The fact it ran for a reasonably significant period, including people travelling out of Wuhan abroad, obviously means flow-on implications were more severe,’’ he told The Weekend Australian.

But Mr Varghese cautioned against laying too much blame at Beijing’s door, saying all countries had made missteps and judgment errors in their early handling of the problem. He said it was unrealistic to expect total transparency from the Chinese Communist Party and debate about the disease’s origins had now become “unavoidably entangled’’ in US presidential politics. “That will only get worse, not better,’’ he said.

Mr Varghese said the “tragedy’’ of the crisis was that it coincided with the death of the multilateral system of diplomacy developed in the wake of World War II.

He said there was no real prospect of conducting an inquiry through the auspices of the UN Security Council, where China exercises a veto, or the G20.