Gotta love China. Doesn't say much about the leadership of the WHO either:
Beijing frustrated World Health Organisation (WHO) officials as they struggled to get critical information at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, leaked internal recordings reveal.
The recordings, obtained by the Associated Press, highlight the United Nations agency’s difficulty in extracting information from China amid concerns that public criticism would make Beijing even more reluctant to open up.
The delayed information included the genome of the coronavirus, which China did not share for more than a week after they had fully decoded it.
The recordings contain officials complaining in meetings during the week beginning January 6 that Beijing was not sharing the data needed to assess the risk that the virus posed to the rest of the world.
China confirmed human-to-human transmission only on January 20 and the agency declared it a global health emergency a day later.
“We’re going on very minimal information,” Maria van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for coronavirus, told a meeting. “It’s clearly not enough for you to do proper planning.”
In another meeting Gauden Galea, the organisation’s top official in China, complains about receiving information only moments before it is relayed by the state broadcaster.
“We’re currently at the stage where they’re giving it to us 15 minutes before it appears on [the state broadcaster] CCTV,” he says.
The WHO has been criticised for its public praise of China’s handling of the pandemic, with its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, crediting the country with “setting a new standard for outbreak response”. That praise was instrumental in President Trump’s decision to halt funding to the agency before withdrawing altogether, condemning it as “China-centric”.
The organisation’s officials apparently feared that pressing China too hard could close lines of communication altogether, leaving them even less prepared to fight the virus. Its member states are required to share data about outbreaks but the system relies on trust and is unenforceable.
China flatly denied any delay in pandemic reporting yesterday, while the agency said that “our leadership and staff have worked night and day in compliance with the organisation’s rules and regulations to support and share information with all member states equally, and engage in frank and forthright conversations with governments at all levels.”
Another recording reveals that Michael Ryan, the WHO head of emergencies, voiced fears of a repeat of the Sars outbreak in 2002, which China also sought to conceal early in its development.
“This is exactly the same scenario, endlessly trying to get updates from China about what was going on,” he said. “The WHO barely got out of that one with its neck intact given the issues that arose around transparency in southern China.”
Mr Ryan criticised Beijing for not co-operating and pushed to apply more pressure. “This would not happen in Congo and did not happen in Congo and other places,” he said, apparently referring to the ebola outbreak. “We need to see the data. It’s absolutely important at this point.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news ... -tpwj37zm2
It only affects Bangkok at the moment, but others normally follow.
