Taiwan has accused the World Health Organization of failing to communicate an early warning about transmission of the coronavirus between humans, slowing the global response to the pandemic.

Health officials in Taipei said they alerted the WHO at the end of December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries

Taiwan is excluded from the WHO because China, which claims it as part of its territory, demands that third countries and international bodies do not treat Taiwan the way independent states are treated.

The WHO’s relationship with China has been criticised in the past, with some countries accusing the organisation of praising Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak despite allegations local officials had initially covered it up.

China being a communist state frowns at doctors making public statement about epidemic without first informing the Government.

li Wenliang was sanctioned for raising alarm about SARS2 outbreak.
The chinese doctor who raised the alarm two weeks before it was officially announced eventually died fighting the outbreak which China initially called a "false alarm"

Taiwan said its doctors had heard from mainland colleagues that medical staff were getting ill — a sign of human-to-human transmission. Taipei officials said they reported this to both International Health Regulations (IHR), a WHO framework for exchange of epidemic prevention and response data between 196 countries, and Chinese health authorities on December 31.

Taiwanese government officials told the Financial Times the warning was not shared with other countries.

“While the IHR’s internal website provides a platform for all countries to share information on the epidemic and their response, none of the information shared by our country’s [Centers for Disease Control] is being put up there,” said Chen Chien-jen, Taiwan’s vice-president.

“The WHO could not obtain first-hand information to study and judge whether there was human-to-human transmission of Covid-19. This led it to announce human-to-human transmission with a delay, and an opportunity to raise an early alert both in China and the wider world was lost,” said Mr Chen, an epidemiologist by training who was health minister at the time of the Sars outbreak.


China’s health ministry only confirmed human-to-human transmission on January 20, after the WHO said in mid-January there might be “limited” human-to-human transmission but stepped back from this view on the same day.

The WHO has had to strike a delicate balance with China throughout the outbreak, with some accusing the organisation of being too pliant.

12 WHO experts visited Wuhan,the city at epicenter of the outbreak.

Bruce Aylward, the Canadian epidemiologist who led the team said Chinese health officials did not want to refer to the pathogen as “dangerous” as they regarded such terminology as reserved for diseases with higher mortality rates.

In summary Tedros Ghebreyesus WHO and Chinese officials caused the spread of this global pandemic called Covid19.

This is serious

China always having a link to every problem of other countries.