Coronavirus: WHO, European Investment Bank pair up to help African countries after US funding cut
- Move follows freeze in funding from largest contributor to World Health Organisation over allegations that it is too deferential to China
- WHO’s director general repeats defence that warning in January gave the world enough time to respond to the pandemic
Officials from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and European Investment Bank (EIB) announced a new partnership on Friday to boost financing to 10 African countries in order to bolster their preparedness against the coronavirus pandemic.
The WHO’s pairing with the European Union’s bank follows a freeze in funding last month from the global health body’s largest contributor – the US – over allegations that it is too deferential to China. Health experts warned at the time that Washington’s move would hit the world’s poorest countries hardest.
The financing initiative, unveiled at a briefing in Geneva, will focus on protecting the chain of essential supplies – including personal protective equipment and diagnostics – as well as training, water security, sanitation and hygiene.
“Combining the public health experience of the World Health Organisation and the financial expertise of the European Investment Bank will contribute to a more effective response to Covid-19 and other pressing health challenges,” said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Tedros did not make an explicit link between the EIB partnership and financing problems created by the loss of US funding.
The move came as the WHO’s own emergency committee called on the health body to support “fragile” and “vulnerable” countries in their fight against the coronavirus, as part of recommendations issued this week to both the WHO and its member states.
Among the guidance released on Friday, the panel also called on countries to “fill research gaps” about the coronavirus, including confirmation of which animal species it emerged from.
That request comes amid conjecture by fringe entities and prominent political figures – including US President Donald Trump – that the virus escaped from, or was intentionally released by, a virology lab in Wuhan.
Pressed on the lab theory, Mike Ryan, the WHO’s health emergencies lead, said that organisation officials were “assured that this virus is natural in origin,” citing scientific analysis of its sequence. “What is important is that we establish what that natural host for this virus is.”
The WHO emergency committee had convened this week under agency stipulations that it meet at least once every three months after the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern – a determination that it upheld at its Thursday meeting.
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The panel initially advised that the coronavirus outbreak constituted a global health emergency in late January, having declined to do so at its first meeting earlier in the month.
The early decision not to declare an emergency has fuelled criticism – including an online petition calling for Tedros’ resignation that attracted more than 1 million signatures – that the agency has been reluctant to antagonise or challenge information from the Chinese government.
Such accusations were at the heart of Trump’s decision to freeze US funding to the WHO in April, pending a review into its “China-centric” pandemic response.
Challenged on Friday about the committee’s initial decision not to recommend a global public health emergency, Tedros said members were divided “because of a lack of information”. Once further data was collected from China, the committee was able to make a determination a week later in a “timely fashion”, he said.
“That allows enough time for the rest of the world to respond because we only had 82 cases [at the time],” said Tedros, who earlier this week said a number of unnamed countries had suffered the consequences of not heeding WHO advice.
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“Sometimes WHO is accused of being too early [in declaring an emergency], like in 2009 for H1N1 [or] too late like for Ebola,” said Didier Houssin, the emergency committee’s chair. “I think in this case the WHO decided in a timely, timely manner.”
Citing the committee’s confidentiality agreement, Houssin refused to answer a question on Friday about who in the panel had argued against recommending an emergency declaration in January.
The comments, reported by the Financial Times, were in stark contrast to WHO leadership’s effusive praise for China’s response, which Tedros has described as setting a “new standard” for outbreak control.
MacKenzie, an adjunct professor at Perth’s Curtin University, was one of a handful of members who did not participate in Thursday’s emergency committee meeting – because of scheduling issues, he said. “We all have other commitments and there was only a little warning of the time for the [emergency committee] meeting,” MacKenzie said in an email.
The panel currently consists of some 20 health experts and government officials from around the world, in addition to about a dozen advisers.
Among the health officials on the panel are representatives from governments in China, India, Thailand and Indonesia. There is no one from the US government on the committee, though more than a dozen US representatives have been on a secondment to the WHO working specifically on the novel coronavirus since the beginning of January, according to organisation officials.
The existence of that direct line between the WHO and the US administration has offered a challenge to claims by the White House that it was kept in the dark by the organisation about the severity of the outbreak.
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But the Trump administration has continued to rail against the WHO, with Trump calling it China’s “public relations agency” on Thursday, and new White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Friday describing its decision not to declare a global public health emergency on January 23 “incredible”.
Speaking during her debut press briefing, McEnany also criticised the WHO’s initial opposition to travel restrictions on passengers from China, and accused the agency of ignoring warnings from Taiwanese authorities of human-to-human transmission.
In a December 31 memo seeking further information from the WHO about the then-unidentified atypical pneumonia, Taiwanese officials had referenced publicly available media reports that patients had been placed in isolation, suggesting fears over transmissibility between people.
Until mid-January, the WHO circulated determinations from Chinese health authorities that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.
