Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, more than 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Friend of the Week: Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization
No economic stimulus or emergency budgets will save us from the novel coronavirus pandemic. It’s a health crisis and we have to support and trust in the scientists and doctors.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, is coordinating the global response to COVID-19.
He has shown determination and leadership from the very start.
On March 19, he once again stressed how important it is for countries to test, isolate and trace new cases of COVID-19 in order to suppress the spread of the virus, which is multiplying throughout the world.
These efforts should be the “backbone of the response in every country,” he said, amid growing concern that practically no country in the world is doing enough testing.
Adhanom Ghebreyesus says that countries that have used the “full package” of measures suggested by the WHO have been able to turn the tide. This includes South Korea, which has effectively worked to mitigate its own COVID-19 crisis.
“The country educated, empowered and engaged communities,” he said in a March 19 WHO briefing. “It also expanded lab capacity and exhaustively performed contact tracing.”
This dedication paid off. Where there had once been 800 cases in Korea, he said, there are now just 90. “It didn’t surrender,” the WHO boss added.
For his leadership at the WHO, which is ensuring that the world implements the best measures to halt the spread of coronavirus, we think Adhanom Ghebreyesus is a friend of Ukraine.
However, it is really the frontline emergency services, medical workers and hospital staff — the doctors, nurses and paramedics who risk their lives to fight this virus, that deserve our praise.
They’re not only our friends. They’re heroes.
Foe of the Week: Chinese President Xi Jinping
How many more major global health crises will China fail to contain and then share with the world before its authorities clean up their act?
Ukraine does not exist on an isolation ward. Action or inaction on the other side of the planet can infect our country, too.
This is a developing nation, an emerging economy and it’s part of an increasingly globalized system. It has great potential, but it is vulnerable.
The novel coronavirus pandemic will badly hurt Ukraine. Its economic impacts are already being felt, despite the few reported cases of infections so far.
And let us be blunt. This catastrophic outbreak was avoidable, much like the SARS outbreak of 2003 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. Virtually all experts agree it was caused by the barbaric and unsanitary conditions that are common in many Chinese animal markets.
I used to live and work in Southeast Asia and have traveled through China.
For a year, I worked at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), running journalism workshops for NGO workers in Burma, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. Some of my former colleagues there are now under strict quarantine.
China’s so-called wet markets, where living, dead or dying animals are kept in close proximity to each other and humans, are a breeding ground for parasites, bacteria and new viruses.
Experts have warned about the danger of these hellish, blood-soaked markets for dead flesh and live creatures for decades. The Chinese authorities have routinely failed to act — even after a Chinese market spawned the SARS virus in 2002.
Chinese importers also fund the smugglers and poachers who run the illegal wildlife trade in Asia, Africa and South America. They are gradually decimating the planet’s animal population, and ever increasing the length of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Some experts have suggested that this novel coronavirus may have originated from a critically endangered pangolin — routinely poached and sold to butchers in China.
“Mother nature’s revenge,” one conservationist called it on Australia’s ABC news.
Chinese doctors and nurses who have been fighting their epidemic are heroes. But instead of being treated as such, they have been threatened, silenced, and some of them have died working in horrific and hopeless conditions at overwhelmed Chinese hospitals.
The Chinese Communist Party and China’s dictator Xi Jinping, as well as his lackeys in the secret police, have suppressed or manipulated the truth about this outbreak from day one.
They silenced whistleblowers and tried to keep the coronavirus their dirty little secret. This has cost thousands of Chinese lives and significantly delayed the global response, leaving countries like Italy not sufficiently prepared for the viral storm that was already coming.
Even now, the Chinese authorities are trying to reshape the narrative around COVID-19 with their aggressive propaganda inside and outside of the country. They are even attempting to dispute the fact that the pandemic originated in China and blaming America.
At least Chinese health officials and doctors are now in Europe helping other countries control the Wuhan pandemic. They deserve our respect and gratitude. Some Chinese firms have also been donating medical supplies to Italy and other affected countries.
“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden,” the Chinese telecommunications company Xiaomi wrote on crates of face masks bound for Italy.
We are all in this together now — waves of the same sea.
But let’s not forget where it all started: with inaction, negligence and suppression of the truth from the totalitarian regime in Beijing.
