This should be the greatest hour for the World Health Organisation, the UN’s Geneva-based body dedicated to fighting just such a global threat as Covid-19.

Instead, WHO is struggling to defend its own credibility – while the impact of the contortions into which it has forced itself by adhering to the People’s Republic of China’s strict shunning of Taiwan has also dragged those questioning it into the firing line.

National governments and health experts around the world are determining the strategies for combatting the pandemic, with polite nods as needed to WHO, but without crucial input from the global body.

The WHO has been approached to respond concerning its position on Taiwan, and to criticisms of politicisation, but has not yet done so.

To an extent, this is inevitable, given the speed of the spread of the virus, and the urgent requirement to act locally superseding the perceived value of thinking globally.

But WHO has also diminished its own potential role as a result of its politicisation.

The General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, told the 2017 national party congress that “reforming and developing the global governance system” is a major foreign-policy priority, in accord with Xi’s hallmark phrase about “building a community with a shared future for mankind”. China has accordingly especially relished and highlighted the applause its governance receives from international multilateral agencies, including the WHO.

Please click here to read the full “WHO and China: Compounding politics and policy” analysis published at The Interpreter, written by Griffith Asia Institute Industry Fellow, Rowan Callick.