Washington / Berlin. The World Health Organization (WHO) has received support from 23 countries in the “Alliance for Multilateralism” initiated by Germany in the dispute over its role in the corona crisis. In a statement on Thursday, the foreign ministers emphasized the importance of global cooperation and international organizations in the fight against the pandemic. Austria did not appear on the list.
“We have to remain united in our humanity,” said the World Health Organization support statement after a video conference. “The Covid-19 pandemic is a wake-up call for multilateralism.” Support the United Nations’ call for global solidarity in the crisis “and especially the role of WHO in coordinating the response to the health epidemic”.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell pledged full support to WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a phone call, the two said on Thursday after a phone call.
Unlike Germany, the turquoise-green government has not yet positioned itself
Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said WHO remains “the backbone of international pandemic control”. Right now it makes no sense at all to question WHO, its functionality or its importance. “This is the worst possible time,” said the SPD politician. “To weaken them would be nothing more than throwing the pilot out of the plane during a flight, and we don’t think that is responsible.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) was also clearly behind the World Health Organization. At a video conference called by Trump for the heads of state and government of seven leading industrial countries (G7), Merkel emphasized that the pandemic could only be overcome with a strong and coordinated international response, government spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Thursday. For this, she expressed her full support to the WHO and other partners, such as the CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) vaccine alliance and the GAVI global vaccine alliance.
The turquoise-green federal government in Vienna has not yet officially commented on Trump’s approach to the WHO. There is no opinion from Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP), it said on Wednesday at the APA request.
The “Alliance for Multilateralism” was initiated by Maas in 2018 to strengthen international cooperation. It has no fixed members like the G7 or G20 and meets in different compositions. The final document on the Corona crisis was signed on Thursday alongside Maas by the Foreign Ministers of Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Ireland, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden and Spain.
Trump steps up: WHO is “a tool of China”
From the perspective of US President Donald Trump, the conversation between the G7’s leaders was somewhat different. A large part of the conversation “focused on the lack of transparency and chronic mismanagement of the pandemic by WHO,” said a White House statement. The heads of state and government have spoken out “for a thorough investigation and a reform process,” it said.
Trump had a temporary halt to the payments to WHO on Tuesday. He blamed the organization for the many deaths in the crisis and accused it of dramatically worsening the epidemic with mismanagement and reliance on information from China. Over the next 60 to 90 days, his government will review the role WHO has played in “poorly handling and hiding the spread of the coronavirus.” Trump’s move met with international criticism – especially since the US President himself is accused of having downplayed the crisis for a long time.
Trump again sharply attacked WHO shortly before the G7 summit. WHO was “a tool of China” in the crisis, he said on Wednesday evening (local time). “Look at everything that happened, you were wrong.” That was either a “tragic mistake” or the WHO deliberately acted in this way. The U.S. government currently chairs the G7 group, which also includes Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Canada and Japan. A G7 summit scheduled for June in the United States had canceled because of the pandemic.
USA review reports on laboratory theory in China
The United States plans to review reports that the coronavirus pandemic may have started in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China. “We are investigating extensively on everything we can learn about how this virus came into the world and caused such a tragedy,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on a Washington Post report Wednesday. According to the newspaper, the US embassy in Beijing had warned the US State Department two years ago of inadequate security measures in a research laboratory in Wuhan. The United States knew that the laboratory in central China’s Hubei province had “highly contagious substances,” Pompeo told the television station. Both Fox News and The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reported that the first person to be infected in this laboratory and then spread the virus.
Chinese scientists assume that the virus was first transmitted from animals to humans at a so-called wet market in Wuhan at the end of 2019, where exotic animals are also slaughtered. US President Donald Trump, who initially played down the pandemic, likes to speak of the “Chinese virus” to Beijing’s outrage. According to the Washington Post, two years before the pandemic, US embassy officials visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which examines bats blamed for the Sars epidemic. Sars’ respiratory disease, which killed almost 800 people in 2002/2003, is also caused by a coronavirus. According to the report, US officials pointed out insufficient safety measures in the laboratory at the time.
Raab and Macran criticize China’s crisis management
France and the UK have questioned the Chinese government’s response to the Corona crisis. Beijing has to answer “hard questions” about the outbreak of the novel corona virus, British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab said in London on Thursday. French President Emmanuel Macron also expressed doubts about China’s crisis management. China has to explain “how it came about and why it couldn’t be stopped earlier,” said Raab, who represents Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He emphasized: “After this crisis, we cannot go back to the agenda.”
Macron told China’s Financiual Times: “Obviously things have happened that we don’t know about.” When asked whether the crisis had revealed the weaknesses of western democracies and the benefits of authoritarian governments like China, Macron emphasized the differences between countries where information flows freely and those where truth is suppressed. “Given these differences, the choices made, and what China is today, what I respect, we shouldn’t be so naive and say that it dealt with it much better,” said the French President.
China rejects allegations
Russia protected China against international criticism. President Vladimir Putin in a phone call to China’s head of state Xi Jinping praised Beijing’s handling of the pandemic, the Kremlin said on Thursday. Xi and Putin therefore called the blaming of China “counterproductive”.
Chinese spokesman Zhao Lijian dismissed Fox News’ report. The World Health Organization said that there was no evidence that the novel pathogen came from the laboratory in Wuhan. To date, almost 140,000 people worldwide have died from infection with the novel corona virus. Foreign affairs spokesman Zhao, for his part, once said that the US Army could have brought the virus to China. (apa, dpa, afp)
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