Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is critical of Beijing. Is that why she is badly received by WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus? assembly: watson
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The dispute between the WHO and Taiwan is coming to a head – and China is at the center of it
The small island nation of Taiwan is doing everything right in the corona crisis and still has to put up with a lot these days. Now the dispute with the World Health Authority is escalating. How it came about.
The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, burst the collar on Thursday. The Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, complained at a press conference the day before that he had been exposed to racist insults for months, which he believed would come from Taiwan. Allegations that Tsai didn’t want to put up with. She shot back sharply.
«Taiwan has always spoken out against all forms of discrimination. We have been excluded from international organizations for years and know better than anyone what it feels like to be discriminated against and isolated »,
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she wrote on social networks. Tedros are welcome to come to Taiwan for a visit. Then he could also find out for himself how committed the Taiwanese people are in combating respiratory diseases Covid-19.
It is the preliminary climax of a conflict between the WHO leadership and the small island nation in eastern China. The dispute originated at the beginning of the corona crisis or even earlier.
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Democratic Taiwan is being denied access to most international organizations, including WHO, under pressure from China. Beijing sees the island republic as its own territory.
While China had reacted too hesitantly to the outbreak of the corona virus, Taiwan acted very quickly and in an exemplary manner. The country took early steps to curb the spread and managed so far that only 380 people were infected with the virus and five people died of it. The Taiwanese government received a lot of praise from international experts for its approach.
The Taiwanese government informed the WHO early on that the virus was transmitted from person to person and that quick and targeted measures were now needed. But the WHO adhered to the Chinese line. And this was: cover up, deny, make critical doctors and journalists disappear.
It is now known that the Chinese authorities have kept the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak secret for a long time. The first person in Wuhan is said to have been infected with the virus by mid-November. However, while Taiwan was putting pressure on the WHO, the latter tweeted in mid-January that Chinese studies had shown that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the corona virus.
It took another two months for the WHO to announce a pandemic in mid-March. At this point the virus had already appeared in over 100 countries. The organization has never criticized China’s actions. The allegations that the World Health Authority is killing Beijing are getting louder and louder.
That General Director Ghebreyesus now accuses racialism of little Taiwan must seem like a bad joke to the small island.
