Canadian doctor is caught in the middle as Trump attacks WHO’s response to COVID-19

WASHINGTON, DC-When President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw U.S. funding from the World Health Organization on Tuesday, accusing the agency of being "very China-centric" in its COVID-19 response, a Canadian doctor may have been at the centre of his thinking.

In comments Wednesday morning, that Canadian responded, defending the WHO's co-operation with China as the crisis emerged.

"It was absolutely critical that we work very closely with China to understand this disease," Dr. Bruce Aylward, the Newfoundland-born physician helping lead the WHO response to coronavirus, said in a virtual press briefing.

"It's got nothing to do with China specifically. It happened to be the place where this started."

He noted his organization was working just as closely with other countries - he discussed his recent work in Spain, specifically, at the press conference - to fight the virus.

Aylward has become the poster-boy for accusations that a too-cozy relationship with China is hampering the WHO's COVID-19 response. The claims began in response to a viral video of Aylward refusing to answer questions about Taiwan (a country Beijing doesn't recognize because it considers it part of China), and cut off an interview with a Hong Kong reporter who insisted on repeatedly asking about it.

Critics on both the left and right have pointed to the video to back up criticisms of the WHO that - when it came to China - it was too slow to share full information, too slow to recommend travel restrictions, among other issues.

Trump seemed to allude to that episode with a surprise announcement Tuesday at his White House press briefing. "We're going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We're going to put a very powerful hold on it and we're going to see," he said, before clarifying he hadn't ordered the hold yet, but was looking into it.

"They called it wrong," he said of the WHO's early advice not to close borders to China. "They seem to err always on the side of China. And we fund it. So I want to look into it."

The U.S. is the world's largest funder of the WHO, contributing roughly 10 per cent of its budget, according to the New York Times.

At the WHO press briefing Wednesday, European Regional Director Hans Kluge responded to Trump's threat. "We are still in the acute phase, so this is not the time to cut back on funding."

And in a separate press conference Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said both the U.S. and China should provide "honest leadership" and stop politicizing the crisis, "if you don't want to have many more body bags."

In discussing his work with China, Aylward said that because the virus originated there it was "absolutely critical to have full access to everything possible to get on the ground there and work with the Chinese to understand this."

"That can be perceived in different ways, potentially, but it was such an important part of what is truly an extraordinary developing public health crisis we're all in the middle of," he said.

Asked by a reporter about Trump's criticism of the WHO stance on border restrictions, Aylward defended both the WHO and China's response to focus on the travel of coronavirus patients, and those who'd had close contact with them.

"China worked very hard very early on, once it understood what it was dealing with, to try to identify potential cases to make sure that they got tested, to trace all the very close contacts, to make sure they were quarantined," Aylward said. "Then they made it very clear that these people could not and would not travel within the country, let alone internationally."

He pointed further to the lockdown on affected regions of China like Wuhan, where the virus first broke out. "Those are the key measures that needed to be put in place to reduce the risk of international spread. Because that's got to be balanced with how do we move goods, services, etc. that are going to be critical to maintaining societies and economies, as well as the international response. So that's the critical thing when it comes to managing the virus and potential movement out of China."

Edward Keenan is the Star's Washington Bureau chief. He covers U.S. politics and current affairs. Reach him via email: ekeenan@thestar.ca