New Delhi/Washington, April 8 (TIWN) US President Donald Trump's accusation against the World Health Organization (WHO) that it is biased in favour of China and is responsible for misleading the world about novel coronavirus has triggered a furore about the global health bodys role in spreading the pandemic.

Though Taiwan on December 31, 2019, had warned the WHO that coronavirus was transmitting from human-to-human, the WHO two weeks later, on January 14, tweeted that preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.

Amid the confusion and indecisiveness, Tedros met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing and commended China for "setting a new standard for outbreak control and for its openness to sharing information."

But he didn't utter a word about the reports in the global press, The New York Times for example, about how China was silencing and arresting critics over the coronavirus outbreak.

It was a month after the warning of Taiwan that the WHO chief decided to declare the contagion a public health emergency. By that time, the confirmed cases of the infection had increased ten times with around 8,000 people testing positive across 18 countries.

At the Munich Security Conference on February 20, Tedros praised China once again, saying that China had bought the world time. With huge number of people succumbing to the disease in Europe and the US, the WHO has now drawn flak from the US administration.

Tedros is accused of being loyal to China since the days when he was health minister of Ethiopia, seeking Chinese investments in his country. About four years ago, Tedros had identified eight industrial parks throughout Ethiopia, which, he said, were to facilitate the migration of Chinese companies to Ethiopia under the "go global" programme of China.

Interestingly, Tedros won the election for the WHO position against a well-qualified candidate even as the global media widely publicised the accusation that he had covered up three different cholera epidemics as the health minister in Ethiopia.