SNA (Tokyo) — The Covid-19 crisis has elevated the visibility of the World Health Organization (WHO) as never before. Indeed, this may be the very first time that a bureaucratic agency of the United Nations, not the Security Council or General Assembly, has become a focus of global media attention. It is quite unfortunate, then, that the WHO’s main face at this crucial juncture has turned out to be a political hack.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is by no means a total failure in his current task. He communicates reasonably well in front of the cameras and is passably articulate, which are certainly key skills for someone in his position, but the recurring problem with Tedros, as he is known for short, is that he is too often playing politics rather than calling it straight.

His background may help to explain how he came to function this way. He came to prominence in his native Ethiopia through his British PhD and service as an effective head of the Tigray Regional Health Bureau. Aside from his medical qualifications, he rose by possessing the right political connections, becoming a member of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, which itself became a constituent part of the nation’s ruling party in the early 1990s. Tedros served as Ethiopia’s Health Minister from 2005-2012, and then its Foreign Minister from 2012-2016. It was as Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister that he announced his candidacy to lead the WHO. He won that election with the united support of African nations and assumed office in July 2017.

During the Covid-19 crisis of early 2020, there have been several episodes in which Tedros’ words and actions have cast doubt upon his credibility, and by extension the credibility of the WHO.

When the WHO held an emergency meeting on January 22, the main topic was whether or not to declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.” The official WHO announcement acknowledged that “the members of the Emergency Committee expressed divergent views” on the matter, which in bureaucratic language suggests very strong disagreement. Committee Chairman Didier Houssin told reporters that the committee was split down the middle. Those who prevented the declaration from being issued at that time had apparently argued that human-to-human transmission of the disease had not yet been confirmed outside China, for some reason seeing that fact as a significant one.

However, when the WHO finally declared that public health emergency more than a week later on January 30, Tedros made it very clear, inadvertently, that politics was responsible for the delay perhaps even more than the science. His praise of the Chinese government was over the top. Tedros declared before his global audience:

As I have said repeatedly since my return from Beijing, the Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak, despite the severe social and economic impact those measures are having on the Chinese people. We would have seen many more cases outside China by now, and probably deaths, if it were not for the government’s efforts and the progress they have made to protect their own people and the people of the world. The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome, and shared it with WHO and the world, are very impressive, and beyond words. So is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries. In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response, and it’s not an exaggeration.

But he still wasn’t done. After finally declaring the public health emergency, Tedros returned to his flattery of the Chinese government.

Let me be clear: This declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China. On the contrary, WHO continues to have a confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak. I’ll repeat this. Let me be clear: This declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China. WHO continues to have a confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak. As you know, I was in China just a few days ago, where I met with President Xi Jinping. I left in absolutely no doubt about China’s commitment to transparency and protecting the world’s people.

There were few who could have heard Tedros comments and not come away believing that politics was a major part of the WHO’s concern. No doubt, many people inside the WHO itself must have been shifting uncomfortably in their seats as Tedros went on and on with his solicitousness toward the Chinese regime, rather than stick to the main point of the press conference, which was to declare the public health emergency.

It was at this point that Tedros had already done significant damage to the WHO’s credibility and clearly flagged that its pronouncements needed to be treated with a degree of skepticism.

But Tedros penchant for the political was again on display in early March when he became concerned that some nations were not acting in a manner that he regarded as sufficiently proactive.

We are concerned that some countries have either not taken this seriously enough, or have decided there is nothing they can do. We’re concerned that in some countries, the level of political commitment, and the actions that demonstrate that commitment, do not match the level of the threat that we all face. This is not a drill.

By this point, Tedros seemed to regard his role as being like that of a stern schoolteacher, not only telling the governments of the world what the WHO had learned about the Covid-19 coronavirus, but also lecturing them on what their public policies should consist of.

Apparently in order to scare the global public into taking the threat more seriously, the WHO director-general also declared that the mortality rate for those infected by Covid-19 is about 3.4%. This was a figure several times higher than most estimates, and signaling the possibility for tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of human deaths. He apparently came up with this figure simply by dividing the number of deaths by the number of officially confirmed cases, and ignoring the very high scientific probability that most coronavirus infections produced little or no symptoms and thus had gone unrecorded.

Even US President Donald Trump was able to perceive the basic logical flaw, telling Fox News,

Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number. Now, this is just my hunch, and, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this — because a lot of people will have this, and it’s very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people. So, you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and, or virus.

Tedros’ figure of 3.4% wasn’t even backed by his own close colleagues at the WHO. Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward, who led the agency team that visited Wuhan, did not attempt to defend the figure when asked about it on Channel 4 News.

What the director-general was highlighting was, if you don’t get on this fast, if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you’re not taking care of your older population properly, this is going to have worse mortality than you’re expecting… 1%, 2%, 3%, this is a serious, dangerous disease.

While Aylward was clearly not willing to criticize Tedros’ mortality rate figure of 3.4%, he did make it clear that this was not a figure that had been endorsed by the medical experts of the WHO, but it was simply Tedros shooting from the hip to provoke the global political response which the director-general believed was appropriate.

Put another way, the 3.4% mortality rate figure was highly irresponsible fear-mongering utilizing the rapidly declining credibility of the office of director-general of the WHO.

There may be more to Tedros personal motivations than we currently understand, but what is already fully apparent is that he cannot be trusted. In this remarkable Covid-19 global crisis, what the world really needed from the WHO was credible, nonpartisan, factual information that represented the best scientific consensus about the nature of the health threat. It did not need someone using his moment in the global spotlight to try to manipulate international debate according to his own personal views.

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