DC Edit | Who cares for WHO?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has not covered itself in glory just when it was expected to lead the world in pandemic times.

Its ambivalence towards the usefulness of the mask in staving off infection by at least stopping those infected from spreading the disease in covering their mouth and nose had done considerable damage already to the fight against the novel coronavirus Covid-19.

It has fouled the air further by first positing that transmission by people without symptoms is “very rare” and then backtracking on it after scientists protested against such facile assumptions.

The UN’s health watchdog was already in the dock for tilting towards China and delaying early warnings about the gathering storm.

There wasn’t too much sympathy for WHO when Donald Trump pulled the plug first on several millions of dollars in annual financing and then withdrawing the United States from its association with the multilateral agency. While the play of superpower politics is not to be denied, the least expected of  WHO was to play its role as a purveyor of scientific information and data about the pandemic that has the world in its deadly thrall.

Quoting dubious science behind the assertion that pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people rarely  infect others through small airborne droplets or “aerosols” is in keeping with the agency’s sloth in keeping up with research findings rapidly evolving as the world grapples with the virus. Confusing and contradictory messages have led to such an implosion of the agency’s image that WHO in in danger of having reduced itself to irrelevance.

The pity is all the more as WHO could have made itself useful even as the virus is spiralling in Latin America, Russia, South Asia and in Africa where only Tanzanina makes the bizarre claim that God has removed Covid-19. The 212 other nations struck by Covid-19 will be better off listening to good science at this critical time.