The WHO chief has been indulging in fear mongering for quite some time, and there’s no stopping him

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) warning about the possibility of deadlier and more infectious coronavirus variants has to be taken with a handful of salt. For under Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the global health body has lost a lot of credibility. “Subvariants of Omicron are more transmissible than their predecessors, & the risk of even more transmissible & more dangerous variants remains. Meanwhile, vaccination coverage among the most at-risk people remains too low, especially in low-income countries,” he tweeted on Wednesday. In the last two and a half years, Tedros has indulged in fear mongering. In the middle of 2020, he said that while a number of vaccines were in phase-three clinical trials and it was hoped that a number of effective vaccines would be available, “there’s no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be.” The next day WHO’s Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan had to offer an explanation: “So there is always a possibility that we don’t get it [the vaccine] right. Or that it takes longer. We may not get it right the first time. And that is why I think the DG is warning people to not believe that the problem is going to be solved in six months or 12 months. We don’t know that for sure.” Tedros’ remark forced Swaminathan to state the obvious.

Fear mongering has been Tedros’ constant refrain. On July 22, even as the deadliness of Covid-19 cases was declining all over the world, he expressed concern over the rising number of cases. On January 24, he warned against assuming that the Covid pandemic was reaching the “end game.” On January 6, he said that though the more infectious Omicron variant of coronavirus appears to produce less severe disease than the globally dominant Delta strain, it should not be categorised as “mild.” Interestingly—or rather intriguingly—a man who appears to err on the side of caution was inexcusably reckless in the early weeks of the novel coronavirus. As late as January 14, 2020, the WHO tweeted, “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.” This was the line that the Communist Party of China (CPC) wanted the entire world to believe; this is exactly what Tedros’ WHO did. There is a mountain of evidence to suggest that scientists at the WHO and elsewhere suspected not just human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus but also its high lethality, but Tedros, who owes his office at the WHO to the Chinese, kept saying what Beijing wanted him to say. Tedros lulled the world into believing that the disease was not very dangerous, so precautions were not taken at the stage at which they could have stopped the spread or at least its virulence. Tedros’ misdeeds and misdemeanours are well known and documented—and yet he got another term as WHO chief. It’s a mad world.