Whatever reputation for competence and honesty the World Health Organisation might once have had has been destroyed by its response to Covid.  It ignored Taiwan’s warnings, claimed China had averted or delayed hundreds of thousands of cases and protected the global community, said China was not hiding anything, and recommended China’s epidemic control policy to the world, saying there was no “clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” of the coronavirus. 

Even after the doctors and journalists trying to expose the outbreak’s extent were brutally suppressed, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, lauded the Chinese government for its “transparency” and for making us...