Third strike should rule out discredited World Health Organisation

World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Picture: AFP

From the moment a new coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, every action the World Health Organisation took has directly lead to its spread across the globe where it has now killed 4.7 million people.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lavished praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping for his transparency when in fact China was engaging in an astronomical cover-up involving the destruction of early virus samples and the arrest and disappearance of whistleblowers.

In the crucial early weeks of the pandemic, Tedros’s insistence that China was successfully managing the virus was a blatant lie that led leaders to falsely believe the outbreak had been contained.

When the US, Australia and New Zealand stopped flights from China, Tedros criticised the travel bans as unnecessary and said they would cause “stigma and fear”.

Yet at the precise moment Tedros was objecting to international travel bans, he supported China’s brutal lockdown in Wuhan where authorities were nailing people into their homes. It was breathtaking hypocrisy.

Scott Morrison declared that this was a global pandemic 10 days before the WHO did.

There has been no apology for this misinformation. No accountability from the organisation charged with protecting global public health.

Now, 21 months on from the initial emergence of a new coronavirus, the international community is unfathomably turning to the WHO once gain to investigate how this pandemic started – in a lab or through human contact with an infected animal.

This is insanity. The WHO has already twice failed to conduct an independent probe into the source of this pandemic.

Its first fact-finding mission to China in February 2020 was meant to explore the origins issue, but WHO and China changed the terms of reference behind the backs of international partners to exclude the origin question and no one visited either the wet market or the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A year later, their second Covid-origins investigation was deemed a farce and was severely compromised by investigators with extreme conflicts of interest, including links to the Chinese military and the Wuhan laboratory.

There is no question the WHO is a discredited body that has failed to protect public health while exacerbating the spread of Covid-19 through its misinformation and lies.

We cannot entrust a third attempt at this crucial inquiry to a body that has already shown itself to be utterly beholden to China at the expense of public health.

The millions who have lost their lives, and their families, deserve more from us than this.

What Really Happened In Wuhan by Sharri Markson is available on Booktopia or Amazon.