Trump sets stage for UNSC meet on Covid-19 on April 9; pans WHO, China

China, supported by Russia and South Africa, had blocked the last attempt to discuss Covid-19 by the UNSC

Updated on: Apr 7, 2020, 23:21:53 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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After US President Donald Trump virtually blamed the World Health Organisation for playing the Chinese side on the coronavirus pandemic, heat will now mount on Beijing at an informal discussion on the virus outbreak in the UN Security Council on Thursday, April 9, at 3 pm EST (April 10 12.30 am). The informal discussion will be preceded by a briefing by the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

UNSC will hold the first informal discussion on Covid-19 after a statement by UN secretary general António Guterres (Agencies)

“The WHO really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately, I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation,” Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday. It is not what prompted the outburst but as one Indian analyst put it, Trump had hit the nail on its head.

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was elected to the post after China backed him in the May 2017 election as he defeated US-backed Dr David Nabarro, who was the candidate of the UK. Despite the coronavirus being detected in Wuhan in China as early as November 17, 2019, the WHO categorised Covid 19 outbreak as a pandemic on 12 March 2020 when it had crossed the borders and created havoc in Europe. By then, the virus had already killed 1,000 people in the european region.

All the 10 non-permanent members of the UN Security Council have backed the informal discussion led by the UNSC President; the post is held by the Dominican Republic. But whether the closed-door discussion will conclude with any outcome depends on the proposals put up and the exercise of veto powers of China and its ally Russia.

If President Trump’s tweet is indicative of the US mind, then the vote will be 13 to 2 or 14 to 1 depending on how Russia plays. Other two members of the P5, the UK and France have suffered at the hands of pandemic and so has Europe.

While China may say that the pandemic is not a peace and security issue - the argument used to block a request by Estonia for a discussion last month - the economic misery that the pandemic has hurled the world towards a deep crisis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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