Jonas Parello-Plesner argues in a new piece for Danish daily Berlingske that the EU ought to support an international inquiry on the early handling of the coronavirus in China. For example, Taiwan reacted earlier than the WHO and enacted steps already in late December.

China’s handling can be compared to the Soviet Union’s effort at cover-up after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. It gets too big even for propaganda to cover all the unanswered questions.

Instead China is seeking to exploit the coronavirus to expand its global influence. Let’s use the energy in the world’s democracies to work for an independent inquiry. Let’s use the occasion to do a necessary health check of our medical supply lines among democratic allies in NATO and beyond. Let’s demand reform of the WHO with a whistle-blower mechanism. That would have given some of Wuhan’s brave doctors somewhere else to turn to outside of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus and to the benefit of global health.

And most importantly, let’s keep our belief in that democracy, transparency and critical debate are the necessary tools to handle a pandemic.