As news recently broke, India has joined the company of 61 countries by submitting a proposal at the World Health Assembly with the intention to identify the zoonotic source of the coronavirus. To clarify, “zoonotic” refers to diseases capable of transferring from animals to humans. The World Health Assembly is acknowledged as the decision-making body of the esteemed World Health Organisation (WHO).
Insight into The Proposal
The proposal in question forms part of a seven-page draft resolution, backed by 35 countries along with the 27-member European Union. It urges the WHO chief to collaborate with the World Organisation for Animal Health and undertake scientific, collaborative field missions. The focus of these would be to decipher the route of introduction to the human population of the novel coronavirus and explore the potential role of intermediate hosts.
These nations demanded an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) response to Covid-19. This comes after the WHO was criticized for accepting findings provided by China without further investigation, leading the US to suspend funding to the body.
The Signatories of the Proposal
Backing this resolution are three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — UK, Russia and France — along with Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. From the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations, only India, Bangladesh and Bhutan have offered their support.
India’s Position
This marks the first occasion on which India has presented a stance within an international forum on both the origin of the virus and the requirement for an independent evaluation of WHO’s response to the crisis. Previously, India expressed its commitment to combating Covid-19 and stated it would revisit the issue once the crisis reached an end. However, Prime Minister Modi unveiled India’s position at the G20 summit held this March, advocating for WHO reform and emphasizing the necessity for transparency and accountability. The virus has had significant repercussions on India, leading to loss of livelihoods, escalating poverty levels and an economic crisis across various sectors.
The Role of China and its Response
It is widely believed that the virus originated from China’s Wuhan, the city where the inaugural case of Covid-19 was reported. China stands accused of hiding pivotal information related to the virus’s proliferation and clinical diagnosis. In its defense, the country has expressed a potential willingness to support a review “at an appropriate time”. However, it lambasted the politicization of the virus’s origin by the US and several other countries, and critiqued any inquiry “based on the presumption of guilt”. It asserted that while Wuhan was the first city to report Covid-19 cases, that does not definitively imply that the virus originated there.
