Coronavirus: Chinese liberals savage WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

For months World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been mocked by liberals in China.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been nicknamed Secretary Tedros by Chinese liberals for his fawning praise of Xi Jinping’s administration. Picture: AFP

For months, World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been mocked by liberals in China. They haven’t been short of material.

They nicknamed him Secretary Tedros (“Tan Shuji” in Chinese) for his fawning praise of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s administration, which the WHO boss said was “setting a new standard for outbreak response”.

They shared photos of Tedros photoshopped wearing a Mao suit. Each new perceived failure inspired another wave of posts, which China’s censors hurriedly deleted.

The Associated Press has just added another volume to the library of investigative journalism on what happened in December and January after the new coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, the capital of the central province of Hubei.

None of these reports — many of the best done by Chinese journalists at Caixin and Renwu — has been flattering of Tedros’s WHO.

The new addition by AP makes them look particularly ill informed, as it reveals on January 14 the head of China’s National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, spoke frankly of the dangers of the new coronavirus at a teleconference with health officials from around China.

“The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,” Ma is reported as saying.

They also report the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from Xi, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan.

The date, January 14, is key. That was the same day Tedros’s WHO sent out its now notorious health update downplaying the new virus.

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus,” the WHO posted on its Twitter account.

The WHO remained in the dark until Xi himself publicly warned about the coronavirus on January 20 — the crucial six-day lag focused on in the AP report.

Whether delivered in Geneva, New York or Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the WHO director-general’s rhetoric has never criticised any aspect of China’s response.

Quite the opposite.

“Particularly at the beginning, it was shocking when I again and again saw (Tedros) … almost directly quoting what I read on the Chinese government’s statements,” Berkeley research scientist Xiao Qiang told The Atlantic.

In late January and throughout February, echoing China, the WHO told the world not to ban travellers from coronavirus hot spots.

In March, it removed advice telling people to not take traditional herbal remedies, in perfect synchronicity with a propaganda campaign by China’s state-owned media that was promoting traditional medicine.

“It was too broad and did not take into account the fact that many people turn to traditional medicines,” a WHO spokes­person told The Australian when asked about the change.

And then there was its position on China’s wet markets, which so puzzled Scott Morrison.

Interestingly, Donald Trump did not inspire another wave of memes in China about “Secretary Tedros” with his announcement this week to stop funding WHO.

That may be because for many here, the US President’s attack on the WHO as “China-centric” was old news.

Or perhaps it was related to the rival library of unflattering reports about his handling of the coronavirus.

Trump had become a favourite of many liberal intellectuals in China in recent years for his often forceful handling of Xi’s regime.

It will be interesting to see how much of that admiration survives the pandemic and the presidential election it looks set to dominate.