'World should have listened': WHO defends its coronavirus approach
The World Health Organisation has defended its approach to coronavirus amid ongoing criticism.
The WHO has suffered widespread denunciation across the world for its response to the virus with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying the organisation made mistakes throughout its handling of the crisis.
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Mr Morrison said the criticism “has been quite deserved”.
The WHO’s also been slammed for appearing to support the re-opening of Wuhan’s wet markets in China where it’s believed coronavirus originated from.
But the organisation’s chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has defended the UN body’s response to the outbreak, stating the WHO issued its highest alert when there were only 82 confirmed cases of coronavirus and zero deaths outside China.
“We can only give advice to countries. We don’t have any mandate to force countries to implement what we advise them. On January 30, we declared the highest level of emergency, global emergency on COVID-19,” he said at WHO briefing on Monday.
“The world should have listened to the WHO carefully.
“Every country could have triggered all its public health measures possible.”
Dr Ghebreyesus added the WHO advised every country to “implement a comprehensive public health approach – find, test, contact tracing”.
“The countries who followed that are in a better position than others,” he said.
US President Donald Trump is among the WHO’s biggest critics.
A furious Mr Trump told reporters earlier this month “so much death has been caused by their mistakes” as he announced he was cutting funding to the WHO.
The US is the largest donor to the WHO with contributions last year exceeding A$615 million.
Mr Trump has called the WHO too “China-centric”, a claim the organisation has denied.
Dr Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO Director-General, defended the UN agency's relationship with China, saying its work with Beijing authorities was important to understand the outbreak which began in Wuhan.
"It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this," he told reporters.
"This is what we did with every other hard hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically."
China contributed about $67 million to the WHO last year.
with AAP and Yahoo! UK
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