VANCOUVER—As the world gasps at U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily pull funding from the World Health Organization, public policy experts say Ottawa should support a review of the organization’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and its relations with Beijing.

But such a review should not include following suit with the U.S. to pull resources, analysts warn.

On Tuesday, Trump announced the U.S. is temporarily halting funding to the WHO pending a review of its role “in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.” He said the WHO accepted mainland China’s initial claims about the virus at face value and didn’t share all it knew about the pandemic.

“The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable,” Trump said at a White House news conference.

Last week, Trump accused the organization of being “very China centric” and said it “seems to err always on the side of China.”

Beijing reacted to the news with a promise to fund the WHO and said the U.S. decision will weaken international co-operation.

Publicly available data shows the U.S. had its compulsory membership fees in the WHO at about $58 million for 2020. Countries can also make voluntary contributions and the WHO says they amount to 75 per cent of its funding. The U.S. put in $281 million in 2018, which is the last year available.

China’s membership fees for this year are nearly $29 million, according to the WHO’s figures, while in 2018 its voluntary contribution was about $6 million.

Canada’s 2020 membership fees are $17.5 million, according to Global Affairs Canada, with $29 million in voluntary contributions in 2018, according to WHO’s figures.

Global Affairs Canada said it has contributed a further $16.5 million to WHO since Feb. 11.

Trump is not the sole critic of the WHO’s relationship with Beijing. But some observers say China’s relationship with the WHO isn’t the only problematic one and that more international bodies are experiencing interference by Beijing, raising calls for a rethink of China’s involvement in them.

On Tuesday, a group of more than 100 China scholars and politicians released a statement criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) response to the crisis and accusing it of a coverup to hide the outbreak in its early stages rather than deal with it.

It calls the pandemic China’s “Chernobyl moment,” referring to the nuclear power plant meltdown and subsequent coverup in Ukraine that helped destroy the credibility of the Soviet Union in 1986.

The statement also lays blame at the feet of the WHO for refusing to allow Taiwan, which it insists is a province of China and not its own country, to participate in the organization at Beijing’s request. Taiwan has its own government and maintains it is a sovereign nation.

“Under the influence of the CCP, the World Health Organisation first downplayed the pandemic,” it reads. “Taiwanese health officials also allege that they ignored their alerts of human-to-human transmission in late December.”

ICAO and the WHO are bound by a UN General Assembly resolution recognizing the People’s Republic of China based in Beijing as the lawful government of China, but Taiwan under the name “Chinese Taipei” has been an invited guest to an ICAO Assembly in 2013 following approval from Beijing.

Earlier this month, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu was hit with a litany of criticism after she suggested a reporter in Ottawa was feeding into conspiracy theories on the internet for questioning her on the WHO’s COVID-19 infection numbers from China.

But nearly three weeks ago in an official statement, China’s own premier had warned officials not to cover up their COVID-19 figures.

U.S. intelligence officials have also warned the veracity of China’s figures cannot be trusted.

The CCP also suffered criticism both at home and abroad for the detention of a group of doctors who initially raised the alarm about the virus. Dr. Li Wenliang, seen as the doctor who first raised the issue of coronavirus, died after contracting COVID-19, enraging the Chinese public.

Canada’s Minister of International Development Karina Gould said the U.S. makes its own decisions and there will be questions about the handling of the pandemic. But, Gould said, now is not the time to ask them.

“After every emergency and after every crisis there should be a deep (examination) of the response and the lessons learned,” she said. “But right now we need to be focused on working together, putting our differences aside, and addressing what is the urgent and existing crisis that we have in global health right now.”

Meanwhile, an MP on the Canada-China Parliamentary Committee meant to examine Canada’s relationship with China said Ottawa needs to take a look at the WHO’s relationship with Beijing.

Conservative Garnett Genuis told the Star that dealing with the pandemic is the main concern, but “in the long run” an examination of the WHO’s response to it should be undertaken.

He said “some of the political and structural incentives which led the leadership of the WHO to be too obsequious to the Chinese leadership,” are of concern.

“Clearly, they were wrong to praise the Chinese government’s response and they still haven’t really owned up to that error.”

He said the exclusion of Taiwan is a particularly important issue, given the country’s success in responding to the outbreak.

Despite the controversy over the WHO’s relationship with Beijing and how it factored in the handling of the pandemic, most experts interviewed by the Star agreed the U.S. decision to pull funding from the WHO is not a good idea.

They said Canada should not follow suit.

The defunding of the WHO will disproportionately affect developing regions, particularly in Africa, where there is a dearth of access to fresh drinking water, says Dexter Voisin, dean of Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto.

“It’s not just access to clean drinking water,” Voison said. “The WHO also provides access to health care, medication and testing. When you look at rates of global COVID rates reported in Bangladesh and India and Africa, the rates are small, not because the impact has been smaller, just because they haven’t had the ability to ramp up testing so the numbers are under-reported.”

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Abandoning such countries in a time of need will impact the whole world, he said.

Jessica Drun, a Washington, D.C.-based expert at the Asia Pacific security and policy-focused Project2049 think tank, said removing the funding will leave a funding and leadership gap that China will try to fill.

“We’re already seeing this happen with China’s outsized influence in UN peacekeeping operations and the appointment of a Chinese representative to the UN human rights council,” Drun said.

“Instead, Washington should work with like-minded countries like Canada to emphasize the continued importance of a rules-based international order.”

Worries about Beijing’s influence over international bodies is not limited to the WHO. Experts are calling for a multilateral review to investigate China’s influence in the United Nations as a whole, since the problems likely extend beyond the WHO.

The U.S. had withdrawn from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in October 2017 and June 2018, respectively.

Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said such moves create a power vacuum.

“I don’t think the answer is to gut or weaken an international institution,” Richardson said. “It’s to make it function the way it’s supposed to function.”

Richardson’s watchdog group and other advocacy organizations had protested the appointment of a Chinese representative earlier this month to the influential United Nations Human Rights Council, given Beijing’s record on human rights issues.

In a comprehensive report in 2017, Human Rights Watch found that China has worked “consistently and often aggressively to silence criticism of its human rights record before UN bodies” and has tried to weaken central mechanisms to advance rights.

In a high-profile case in 2013, Chinese police detained activist Cao Shunli after she tried to travel to Geneva to participate in training on the Human Rights Council. After Cao became ill in detention and died, the Chinese delegation in Geneva blocked a moment of silence for her at the Council in March 2014.

There hasn’t been evidence of financial coercion or bribery, she said, but it seems more that UN officials and members have repeatedly shied away from “having a diplomatic fight with China.”

It can be easy for people in stable countries to underappreciate the role of the United Nations, but in places where the state perpetrates human rights abuses, or where public health infrastructure is lacking, Richardson argued people don’t have that luxury.

“If like-minded governments that care about these institutions don’t come together soon to develop a plan to push back against the Chinese government agenda, I think we’ll have a very different and weaker set of institutions in the not too distant future,” Richardson said.

The debates about the WHO’s actions in relation to China during the COVID-19 pandemic follow a recent controversy involving another UN agency.

In January, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which is based in Montreal, blocked numerous critics on Twitter who were voicing calls for Taiwan and Taiwanese experts to be included in discussions around the outbreak of the new coronavirus.

In one case, a consultant was surprised to find he was blocked after only retweeting another user’s post calling for Taiwan’s participation.

Neither the ICAO nor the World Health Organization recognizes Taiwan’s sovereignty and will only work directly with Beijing.

Most criticisms had centred around whether it makes sense for Taiwan — as a major air-travel hub in Asia — not to have direct access to the agency to contribute to the fight against the coronavirus.

But there is concern about the will to conduct such reviews into China’s growing influence over international bodies, especially as the world braces for the economic fallout of COVID-19.

Public health as well as human rights are at stake, so this should be priority, and realistically, countries will have to figure out how to work with the U.S. as a central player in the process, said Taipei-based researcher J. Michael Cole, a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa.

“Much of the world is in a bit of a slump at the moment and may feel powerless. We’ll need enlightened leadership and sufficient momentum through democracies working in concert. Given the stakes, I think it’s absolutely essential that something like this happens.

“President Trump’s attitude toward allies, unfortunately, has gotten in the way of the alliance-formation that will be needed to deal with the challenge. Trump is partly to blame for this; allies also are responsible: they have let their resentment for Mr. Trump get in the way of collaboration with the rest of the U.S. system and society.”

Richardson said, “Every week that goes by, when there isn’t that pushback just makes it that much easier for Beijing to advance its agenda.”

With files from The Associated Press and Bloomberg

Joanna Chiu is a Vancouver-based reporter covering both Canada-China relations and current affairs on the West Coast for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @joannachiu

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