COVID-19 pandemic puts WHO back in hot seat

The UN's health agency has faced criticism in the past for overreacting and for moving too slowly in fighting epidemics, but it has rarely faced as much scrutiny as with the coronavirus pandemic.

The World Health Organization was deemed too alarmist when it faced the H1N1 epidemic in 2009 but five years later it was accused of dragging its feet in declaring an emergency over the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, which would go on to kill more than 11,000 people.

After that debacle, the WHO reformed and created a rapid response unit that has since helped to tackle two Ebola outbreaks in Democratic Republic of Congo.

And yet, the organisation is once again under fire, with critics saying it did not react quickly or strongly enough to the new coronavirus, which emerged in Wuhan, China, late last year.

The agency has been accused of delaying sounding the alarm for fear of offending Beijing, for waiting too long to declare the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic and for failing to coordinate a coherent international response.

Also, a consensus appears to be emerging on the need to close down public spaces to limit the spread but the WHO has given little guidance on these measures.

"WHO remains surprisingly silent and absent in all of these pragmatic questions," Antoine Flahault, head of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, wrote in The Lancet medical review, asking: "Is there any orchestra conductor?"
"To alienate China early in the process by pointing out mistakes would have been a mistake," Ann Lindstrand, in charge of WHO's expanded immunisation programme, told AFP, saying Beijing's cooperation was crucial. "Tedros did the right thing."