No need to politicize COVID-19: UN health agency chief

United Nations
09 Apr 2020, 01:51 GMT+10

Responding to criticism levelled on Tuesday at the agency, Tedros Adhenom Ghebreyesus said, emphasizing that "my short message is, please quarantine politicizing COVID."

"The unity of your country will be very important to defeat this dangerous virus. Without unity, we assure you...any country that may have a better system will be in trouble and more crisis. No need to use COVID to score political points."

Tedros encouraged leaders to work across political, religious and other barriers at the national level.

Readers can find information and guidance on the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from the UN, World Health Organization and UN agencies here. For daily news updates from UN News, click here.

He also underscored the need for global solidarity at this time, recalling how the United States and the former Soviet Union came together in the Cold War era to work on eradicating smallpox.

"And now the United States and China should come together and fight this dangerous enemy", he advised, "and the rest of the world should come together to fight it".

With more than 60,000 worldwide lost to the disease, Tedros warned that more people will die without a common united front.

"We will have many body bags in front of us if we don't behave. When there are cracks at the national level and global level, that's when the virus succeeds".

Tedros revealed that he has received racist comments and even death threats in the three months since WHO was informed of the "pneumonia with unknown cause" that first emerged in Wuhan, China at the end of December.

"I don't care who says what about me. I would prefer to focus on saving lives", he stated.

We will have more to come covering WHO's efforts to help stem the pandemic, shortly.

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