How One Early Tweet From Wuhan May Have Doomed the WHO
Bill Gates is right when he says the world needs the organization now more than ever. But its reliance early in the pandemic on China’s information—and lies—is shocking.
Denis Balibouse
PARIS—Finally the question came. Forty-five minutes into a Zoom press conference with top figures of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday afternoon, a Spanish journalist asked them flat out to defend their organization against charges leveled by President Donald Trump.
The day before, during Trump’s Five O’Clock Follies at the White House, he’d blamed the WHO for, in essence, covering China’s ass in January as Beijing lied about how contagious the newly identified coronavirus in the city of Wuhan really was.
In a now-infamous Jan. 14 tweet, the WHO declared “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.”