Former British spy chief says
China and WHO bear responsibility for flawed coronavirus response
by Jerry Dunleavy
| April 15, 2020 06:21 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-british-spy-chief-says-china-and-who-bear-responsibility-for-flawed-coronavirus-response
The former
head of the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service said the Chinese
government and the World Health Organization bear responsibility for a flawed
response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Sir Robert John Sawers, who was
chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, from 2009 through 2014, told
BBC Radio on Wednesday the Chinese Communist Party is “evading” its
responsibility for the current global pandemic. He also said the WHO has
“serious questions to answer."
Sawers, who was also the former
British permanent representative to the United Nations from 2007 through 2009,
warned that China has been moving toward becoming a surveillance state for
years, especially under the half-decade of leadership of Xi Jinping, and that
it has increased its influence over the United Nations.
“There is deep anger in America
at what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China, and China is
evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus and for
failing to deal with it originally, initially,” Sawers said, adding: “It’s
going to be a complicated, complex set of issues we’re going to have to deal
with, and the world will not be the same after the virus as it was before.”
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The British intelligence
community has signaled they will recommend the U.K. take a tougher line
toward China in the wake of the pandemic. The U.S. intelligence community suspects
that China misled about the initial coronavirus outbreak and continues to lie
about its cases and death toll.
The former MI6
leader argued, “It would be better to hold China responsible for those issues
rather than the World Health Organization” because the WHO is “only as good as
its member states.” He also lamented that China’s role at the U.N. has “steadily
grown as China’s power has grown,” and noted that “heads of U.N. agencies are
wary of offending one of the major powers.”
Still, Sawers
said, “That doesn’t excuse the head of the WHO for failing to stand up for the
facts and the data and making the right demands of the Chinese.”
“The WHO has got serious
questions to answer about its performance," he said, even as he
acknowledged any “anger should be directed toward China rather than the WHO.”
President
Trump announced on Tuesday
that he was halting funding to the WHO while a review was conducted to assess
its role in “severely mismanaging and covering up” the coronavirus.
“The WHO
failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted
directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts,” Trump said. “There was credible
information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which
should have spurred the WHO to investigate and investigate immediately. Through
the middle of January it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was
not human-to-human transmission happening despite reports and clear evidence to
the contrary.”
WHO
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday
”we regret” Trump’s decision to halt funding. Tedros has repeatedly praised
China’s response, including after a meeting with Chinese President Xi
Jinping in Beijing in late January.
WHO Health Emergencies
Programme Executive Director Michael Ryan defended the WHO’s response, telling
reporters that “in the first weeks of January, WHO was very, very clear” about
the danger posed by the coronavirus.
There is well-documented evidence
that China tried to cover up the existence and the spread of the
coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the World Health
Organization, and attempted to block outside health experts. At least
one study indicated that, if the Chinese government had acted more
quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
Reports
showed Chinese doctors knew in about late December and early
January that human-to-human transmission of the
coronavirus was almost certainly happening, yet the WHO tweeted on Jan. 14
that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have
found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus
(2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White
House Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, told The View
on Wednesday that an autopsy of sorts would need to be conducted after the
pandemic to assess how transparent China and the WHO were early on in the
outbreak.
“I think once this is over,
we’ll be able to look back and see did China and the WHO say and do everything
to alert the rest of the world to the nuances of this virus. Because when it
first explodes, someone had to have known that there was human-to-human
transmission,” Birx said. “I see how this has moved through the United States,
and I can see how you can go from one or two cases to hundreds of cases in a
high, high doubling rate … That’s not subtle, and so you really have to go back
and ask yourself why wasn’t there this level of transparency when this
exploded.”
Birx said that people would
have prepared differently from the outset if they had known the level of
transmissibility of this virus.
Sawers also weighed in on what
role better intelligence could have played in detecting any evasions by
Beijing.
“Intelligence is about
acquiring information which has been concealed from you by other states and
other actors. There was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese
were indeed concealing this from the West,” the former top U.K. spy said. “I
think the need to build up our resilience and our preparedness for a pandemic
means doing things on a national level … but also doing more on the international
level.”
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