Despite Trump’s agenda, there are real reasons to criticise the World Health Organisation

There have been embarrassing examples of obsequiousness by the UN’s global health agency

The WHO and its director-general will continue to be a target for the Trump team and Republicans in Congress (Stefani Reynolds/Pool)

There are justifiable reasons to criticise the actions of the World Health Organisation that allowed China to hide the outbreak of coronavirus from the rest of the world at a critical time – a fatal delay that led to the pandemic sweeping across the world with such terrible human and economic cost.

But the timing of Donald Trump’s announcement that he was suspending American funding to the WHO, in the middle of a massive global health emergency, can also be seen as an attempt to divert attention from his own woeful and chaotic handling of the crisis. It also masks how US and western negligence and missteps have helped to create this state of affairs in the organisation.

The shortcomings of the WHO regarding China have been much discussed. Its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyeseus, has been held up as the prime culprit for his seemingly unswerving support for the Chinese government. He has been fulsome in his praise for Beijing’s supposed openness in “sharing information” and “for setting a new standard for outbreak control” while it was blocking a WHO delegation from visiting Wuhan, where the virus began.

There have been embarrassing examples of the WHO’s obsequiousness. Its head of the health emergencies programme, Michael Ryan, could not bring himself to condemn the mistreatment of the Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, who was detained by the Chinese authorities for alerting his colleagues about the start of the disease: one from which he subsequently died.

Even after the Chinese government admitted that the treatment of the doctor was, in retrospect, “irregular” and “ improper”, all Ryan could say was: “We all mourn the loss of a fellow physician and colleague. [But] there is an understandable confusion that occurs at the beginning of an epidemic. So we need to be careful to label misunderstanding versus misinformation. There’s a difference, people can often misunderstand and they can overreact.”

Then there was the extraordinary television appearance of Bruce Aylward, who led the WHO team in China on coronavirus, which went viral on social media.

When a journalist from Hong Kong asked him in an interview about the efforts to combat the virus by Taiwan, which China does not recognise as an independent state, Aylward first pretended not to hear the question and then appeared to hang up on the call. When the journalist called back, Aylward ended the interview with “we’ve already talked about China, and when you look across all the different areas of China, they’ve actually done quite a good job”.

It is worth noting at this point that the failure to criticise China over coronavirus in the WHO is not just confined to Tedros from Ethiopia, from a continent where China is accused of buying influence, but Ryan from Ireland and Aylward from Canada.

China had lobbied for Tedros to get the WHO job, which was previously held by Margaret Chan, from China. He received 133 votes in the election in July 2017. David Nabarro, from Britain, who was backed by the US, UK and Canada, came second with 50. It was not just Beijing’s support that got him the majority of 83. He had other backing as well, notably from India, China’s great regional rival, whose leader Narendra Modi is supposed to have a “special relationship” with Trump. There was also support for the candidacy form the African Union, not all of whose members are in thrall to China.

The election was not a simple east/west issue, but also a north/south one. Critics in the US and Europe claim that Beijing orchestrated this division; but they failed to counter it despite Margaret Chan’s poor performance during the Ebola epidemic in which African states were the ones to suffer most.

The WHO was perceived to have lost control of the situation, and a number of states – including the US and UK – had to deploy more than 5,000 military personnel at the request of the affected countries. Around 11,300 people died, mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The 2017 WHO election became quite nasty at times. Nabarro’s western backers accused Tedros of covering up a cholera epidemic in Ethiopia when he was health minister – an accusation Tedros described as “a last-minute smear campaign”. Nabarro says he knew of the accusations, but denied authorising their use by his supporters.

A US congressional committee has now asked the WHO for its communications, and those of Tedros, with Chinese authorities. But despite all the claims of his Chinese sympathies during the election, there has been little scrutiny of the director-general since he took up his post. The day after his election, Tedros told Chinese state media that he would ensure the WHO maintained the “One China” policy that accepts Beijing’s suzerainty over Taiwan.

Britain’s Nabarro is now a WHO special envoy: there is no record of him criticising Tedros since getting his job.

Meanwhile, the American seat on the WHO’s executive board has been unfilled since 2018. There was no sign of it being filled until the coronavirus outbreak, and Trump started attacking the organisation as the rate of infections and deaths rocketed in the US. Last month the president said he would nominate someone for the vacancy without saying when that it will be.

The WHO has depended on funding to carry out its mandate since it was founded. This consists of assessed contributions, or membership fees, and voluntary donations. International voluntary contributions to cover its budget deficits have grown by 18 per cent from $3.9bn in 2014-15 to nearly $4.7bn in 2018-19. This makes the organisation susceptible to the influence of donors

The US remains by far the largest contributor with its contribution of $893m in 2018-19. China’s $86m in the same period is relatively small in comparison, but it has grown by 52 per cent since 2014; it has also raised its donations from $8.7m in 2014 to $10.2m in 2019.

But Washington is $200m in arrears with its payment, while the Chinese have been diligent in paying its dues. Any suspension of funding on Trump’s orders would undoubtedly lead to major problems for the WHO. It is unlikely to be permanent, although we wait to see what concessions the US may want in return for the blocking to be lifted. But one should not be surprised if China tries to exploit the impasse while it lasts.

Tedros will continue to be a target for the Trump team and Republicans in Congress. They have repeatedly pointed to the WHO director-general’s failure to criticise Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership as evidence of Beijing’s malignant influence.

There is another noteworthy example in the international scene of such an uncritical stance. Donald Trump, a serial attacker of so many world leaders and public figures, has never ever been critical of Vladimir Putin. But as the US president has stressed so many times, any allegations of Russian collusion in getting him to the White House, of the Russian leader having a hold over him, is nothing but scurrilous fake news.