Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology in New Jersey, a fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America, believes China’s influence over the WHO played “a decisive role” in the agency’s failure to act decisively at the start of the pandemic.
“Not only did it have a role; it has had a decisive role,” he said. “It was the only motivation. There was no scientific or medical or policy justification for the stance that the WHO took in January and February 2020. That was entirely premised on maintaining satisfactory ties to the Chinese government. So at every step of the way, the WHO promoted the position that was sought by the Chinese government ... the WHO actively resisted and obstructed efforts by other nations to implement effective border controls that could have limited the spread or even contained the spread of the outbreak.”
He added: “It is impossible for me to believe that the officials in Geneva, who were making those statements, believed those statements accorded with the facts that were available to them at the time the statements were made.
“It’s hard not to see that the direct origin of that is the support of the Chinese government for Tedros’s election as director-general ... This was a remarkably high return on [China’s] investment with the relatively small sums that were invested in supporting his election. It paid off on a grand scale for the Chinese government.”
David Fidler, a former WHO legal adviser, is scathing about Tedros’s “obsequious” praise for Xi and suspects that “the WHO knew China was not being transparent, particularly about information related to human-to-human transmission”. He added: “The praise that he heaped on China gave them no incentive to change their behaviour.”
Tedros finally declared an international public health emergency on January 30. By then the virus had been detected in 18 countries and was almost certainly lurking undetected in many others.
''''The WHO’s failure to act had blown the world’s only chance to contain the pandemic at source, Ebright believes. “Ironically, China’s success in curbing the spread and containing the spread by implementing appropriate border controls ... tells us that, had this been done globally, in January, this outbreak could have been potentially contained,” he said.
On aurait pu contenir l'épidémie mais les liens entre le directeur général de l'OMS et la Chine ont fait que l'on n'a pas fait les bons choix