Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 19 May 2020. © Richard Kemp

The World Health Organisation is launching an ‘impartial, independent and comprehensive’ investigation into the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. That is like getting the poacher to probe the disappearance of the pheasants. The WHO itself should be under investigation for its own response, which has sacrificed medical objectivity for a Chinese dominated political stance. Hardly surprising when its director general is not a physician but a politician.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has a track record of miscalculation and misjudgement. In 2017 he appointed Robert Mugabe as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador. In a forestaste of his public pronouncements on China’s handling of coronavirus, Tedros praised Mugabe’s health policies when the reality was that he had presided over a backsliding in the country’s healthcare – not to mention his savage and widespread human rights abuses.

The WHO ignored Taiwan’s early warning in December about human-to-human transmission of Covid-19, preferring to parrot China’s denial of that fact for a month. The Canadian head of WHO’s Covid-19 response team showed his apparent contempt for Taiwan by refusing to answer media questions on its relationship with the WHO. Taiwan remains excluded from the WHO despite being one of the most successful countries in the world in containing the virus. But of course the Chinese Communist Party sees Taiwan as an enemy which it has vowed to conquer before the 100th anniversary of Mao’s revolution in 2049.

The WHO continues to repeat Chinese propaganda as though it were the truth. Despite Beijing’s cover-ups, silencing of its own (more…)