MOSCOW — The World Health Organization is doing its job properly in the midst of the novel coronavirus crisis, said Russia on Saturday, batting back U.S. criticism of the international agency.
“I think the WHO is living up to its role as the leading and coordinating agency,” said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in comments to Russian media. “Yes, it’s not ideal. But nobody is perfect.”
Earlier this month, U.S. President Trump announced that his country would end its contributions to the WHO budget, arguing that lives had been lost because the WHO had mismanaged the health crisis and put too much faith in information from China, where the disease first transferred from animals to humans.
Trump argued that the WHO’s mistakes have allowed the virus to grow into a pandemic that has infected millions worldwide and led nearly 200,000 to die of COVID-19, the respiratory disease that the virus can cause.
But Lavrov said he thinks such criticism has little to do with the WHO’s performance.
“In my opinion, people want to use such attacks to justify one’s own approach, which came too late and wasn’t adequate.”
Trump has been roundly criticized for not taking the spread of the virus seriously until it had spread widely in America, as well as for leaving federal health agencies unprepared for such an outbreak.
Lavrov said the pandemic’s spread has also revealed problems in the European Union, weakening the bloc.
“Nation states are expressing the wish to be more reliant on themselves,” he said, adding that this was not a problem specific to the virus.
“It probably reflects a certain exhaustion. It’s absolutely obvious in the EU how stubborn and coercive the multinational and supranational bureaucracy can be.”
But he added that the virus can only be fought with cooperation.
Earlier this year, Russia was seeing fewer cases than Western Europe. But infection rates have since picked up. According to official data, there are now 74,600 confirmed cases in Russia, most of them in Moscow. Nationwide, about 680 people have died.
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