World Health Organization (W.H.O.) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted a series of single-word messages to his Twitter account Tuesday evening, in a stream of consciousness thread without context and seemingly not connected to his other tweets.
Tedros provided no further explanation for the series of tweets, but responses to the one-word statements were resoundingly sarcastic and critical, including “Hope you resign.”
Many replies were simply displays of the Taiwanese flag.
The Ethiopian public health bureaucrat, who is the first head of the organization not to be a medical doctor, and the W.H.O. have been engaged in a public dispute with Taiwan in recent weeks over the Chinese coronavirus pandemic and the W.H.O.’s dismissive attitude toward the island nation.
World leaders accuse the United Nations (U.N.) agency of supporting China’s cover-up of its initial coronavirus outbreak, and of mismanaging the spread of the coronavirus globally.
Taiwan has been blackballed from membership in the U.N. health body because China considers the island a renegade province. Taiwan has never been ruled by Beijing and operates as an independent, democratic state with its own functioning government and military.
The W.H.O.’s denial of membership to Taiwan – and its refusal to listen to Taiwan’s early warnings about the Chinese coronavirus outbreak in China late last year, well before China admitted to the contagion – has been met with a wave of criticism by the international community in recent weeks.
The W.H.O. has also been slammed by Taiwan for listing China’s coronavirus statistics alongside the island nation’s – as if they were both one country – creating an illusion that Taiwan’s outbreak was worse than it is by attributing Chinese statistics to it.
Tedros’s response to the condemnation has been to vaguely accuse Taiwan of attacking him personally with racially-charged slurs, for which he has provided no evidence. Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, responded to the accusations by inviting Tedros to visit Taiwan.
On April 14, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he would halt all American taxpayer funding of the U.N. agency due to its support of China amid the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.