EU to propose process for how WHO can learn from Covid-19 outbreak

The European Union is to put forward proposals for a mechanism to learn from the coronavirus pandemic at the next meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) but will stop short of calls from the US and Australia for a full international inquiry. Brussels is trying to steer a course between the US and China in the blame game between the superpowers. Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, has blamed China for tens of thousands of deaths and demanded the WHO hold an inquiry into what it was told by the country about the outbreak. At issue in any inquiry would be timing and whether it would focus on what happened in China, China’s communications with the WHO or the WHO’s own response.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said the bloc’s proposal, to be put forward at a virtual meeting of the WHO on 18 May, would “provide access to how to learn more about the origin of this disease to prevent the next pandemic. Because it wasn’t going to be the last. Lessons will have to be learned from it.”

There is support within Europe, including from the UK, for an examination of the WHO’s role. The US has reduced its leverage in calling for a full inquiry, however, by suspending its payments to the WHO in a move widely seen as counterproductive. Borrel said he had not seen evidence to support the sometimes contradictory US claims that the virus was deliberately or accidentally leaked from a state-run laboratory in Wuhan. “I think that when the US president makes such strong allegations against someone, he has information that I don’t have,” he said in an interview with the European Council on Foreign Relations, a thinktank.

“I do not think it is the time for blame games or mutual reproach,” Borrel added. “This is the rhetoric we are somewhat hearing in the United States, calling the virus ‘Chinese’, or the ‘Wuhan virus’. I don’t think it is the moment to reproach anybody but instead to join forces against a problem that is everyone’s. If we don’t solve it everywhere, we won’t solve it anywhere.

Source: The Guardian