Is the World Health Organisation in Xi Jinping’s pocket?

It is hard to know what to make of the World Health Organisation.

Is it Beijing’s stooge, acting to deflect criticism of China’s alleged role in spreading disease around the world, or is it simply a rather humdrum agency of the United Nations, run by bureaucrats who, when they’re not travelling the world first class, live more or less tax-free in Geneva?

Or is the answer that it is a bit of both?

Until very recent times, there was general acceptance that the United States, long sceptical of the UN, could be relied on to keep agencies such as the WHO from going off the rails. Washington may have risked offending progressive opinion with its constant carping from the sidelines, but it remained the undisputed paymaster of international action.

That all changed with the arrival in the Oval Office of Donald Trump and the doctrine of America First. Trump was convinced that Covid-19 had been released by China – possibly as a deliberate attempt to sabotage his presidency – and, upon learning that the WHO was not willing to go along with his analysis, immediately suspended funding.

Did this leave an opening for Beijing, which for years, via its Belt and Road initiative, has been seeking to supplant the US as the font of all that is good and effective in the developing world? The answer is yes. But where does that take us?

It is easy to jump to conclusions. Science teaches us that we should always wait until the evidence is in. What, though, if the evidence is in and the only reasonable conclusion, consistent with the facts, is that the WHO is on the way to becoming a subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party?

According to the findings, announced this week, of a year-long WHO probe into the origins of Covid-19, it is “extremely unlikely” that the virus was the result of a viral leak from a top-secret laboratory in the city of Wuhan. The inquiry team was only allowed to enter the lab in the final few days of its investigation, having been stonewalled for the previous nine months. It was also prevented from speaking freely with workers and customers in the city’s infamous “wet market,” said by Beijing to have been the source of the contagion. Overwhelmingly, what it did was “review” data assembled by China’s own experts, which had been vetted, and quite possibly redacted, by representatives of the Communist Party.

Listening to the presentation of the WHO team’s findings, critics of both China and the inquiry felt vindicated. The process resembled nothing more than a trial in which the judge has ordered that the only admissible evidence is the case for the defence and that the principal suspects and their associates are not to be cross-examined.

It should be said at once that nothing has been proved. The official position, that a freak transmission from bats to bat-eating customers in the wet market, possibly by way of edible pangolins, may be the correct one. Stranger things have happened. But fears of a cover-up have not been put to rest by a seemingly pliant report compiled by friends of the accused.

In pre-Covid times, hardly anyone outside of the organisation itself gave much thought to the WHO – which is, of course, part of the problem. Western governments came up with their slice of the funding and pretty much left it at that. From time to time, there would be announcements about the progress of work being done in developing countries and, inevitably, of the need for greater global awareness. By and large, however, these were ignored, not just by governments, but by the media.

Only when the West became part of the problem following the spread of the coronavirus did we start paying attention to what the organisation actually does. With an annual budget currently standing at just under $8 billion, it employs a staff of 7,000 and operates in 149 countries. It will not hire smokers but is more than happy to recruit celebrity “goodwill ambassadors,” such as Peng Liyuan, wife of the Chinese Communist leader Xi Jinping, and, until the world got wind of it, with his people starving and his country in uproar, the late Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe.

There is no doubt that the WHO does good work. It was to the fore in the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s. More recently, it has helped reduce the incidence of polio worldwide while contributing important research in the field of HIV/Aids and the development of an Ebola vaccine.

But it needs money – lots of it – to keep the show on the road. When Donald Trump cut off US funding last April, the organisation faced a crisis. It could still rely on its second-largest donor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (with the UK in third place), but without Washington’s contribution, cutbacks were inevitable.

What is odd, and has never been explained, is the fact that the UN body had pivotted to Beijing even before Trump pulled the plug (a decision since reversed by the Biden Administration), to the extent even of denying Taiwan WHO membership. This was in spite of the fact that China’s contribution to its budget was minimal, below that of Rotary International and the European Commission. In January of last year, the organisation’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was photographed bowing (almost curtseying) to Xi, whose wife, as a goodwill ambassador, was no doubt close by.

Tedros is no slouch. An Ethiopian, he qualified as a biologist in London and Nottingham before embarking on a political career that, in spite of his declared allegiance to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (currently at war with the central government) saw him serve as health minister and foreign minister in Addis Ababa.

At the time of his appointment in 2017 as WHO director general (taking over from China’s Margaret Chan), there was speculation that Tedros had been given valuable support by Beijing. Be that as it may, China at that point had not put its money where its mouth was, leading to an assumption that the kowtow to Xi was pre-emptive, in anticipation of cash to come.

Whatever the truth, China has certainly profited from the association. Almost from day one of the Covid crisis, when in Wuhan officials were being detained for “spreading rumours,” the WHO has stood by Beijing’s version of events: that an unforeseen, and essentially unforseeable, transmission from bats to humans in Wuhan’s wet market was responsible for the outbreak. China, in its view, had come clean straight away and addressed the subsequent health crisis in an exemplary fashion.

Tuesday’s news conference in Beijing, led by the Danish researcher Ben Embarek, in which the WHO inquiry team presented their findings, echoed that first response.

“Our initial findings,” Embarek told a room of mostly Chinese journalists, “suggest that the introduction [of the virus] through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research.”

Embarek, formerly based at the WHO’s Beijing office and an adviser to the Chinese government on food safety, said that one of the other hypotheses investigated by the team was the possibility of a laboratory-related incident. But this, he added, was the least likely to be the cause of the spread to humans and would not be investigated further.

If the WHO’s attitude to the origins of Covid raises as many questions as answers, China’s role in the affair is easier to assess. Beijing does not want to be blamed for a global pandemic that to date has killed some two-and-a-half million people. Nor does it want to pay for it. Rather, it wishes to be seen as the country that first identified the virus and pioneered the first successful societal response.

The fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specialising in coronaviruses and their means of transmission, is located close to the epicentre of the original outbreak is said by China to be no more than a coincidence. It was constructed in partnership with France and is reckoned to be the Fort Knox of virological research. It has not, however, been independently inspected since it opened for business. The last time outsiders were allowed to enter the facility was in 2017 when it was formally inaugurated by then French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

During his visit, Cazeneuve commended the closeness of the bilateral relations that bound France and China, emphasising their “shared interests and mutual trust”. France and China, he went on, would make the most of Wuhan’s assets in order to promote an urban model for innovative development: the sustainable city.

So how did that work out? Last June, in a possibly unguarded moment, Shi Zhengli, the institute’s deputy director and a globally respected virologist, told Scientific American magazine, that she hadn’t slept for days because of fears that Covid-19 might have escaped from her facility. Later, according to Chinese state media, she corrected herself, saying that she would bet her life that what happened had nothing to do with the lab.