Her quick smile and perky manner make Margaret Chan (
But the Hong Kong physician has fought some major medical battles in the past three decades, and she's now a serious candidate to become the next boss of WHO.
She has a good shot at winning because her candidacy is being sponsored by China. It's the first time China has nominated anyone for a top UN job, indicating the massive nation's interest in playing a bigger role in global affairs.
But questions are already being raised about whether Chan would be able to stand up to her patrons in Beijing if the government again fails to cooperate in fighting a disease outbreak.
Beijing was widely accused of trying to conceal SARS in 2003, helping the often deadly virus to spread worldwide.
"If Dr Chan cannot stand firm, because she's a Chinese national, she may not have the guts enough to react to the Beijing government. If a similar SARS incident happens in the future, the whole world would be in a crisis,'' said Andrew Cheng (
Chan recently told journalists that she wouldn't be soft on China.
"If elected, I'm not serving Hong Kong's interests. I'm not serving China's interests. I'm serving the world's interests. That's a very important message to get clear," she said.
Chan insisted that China has learned from SARS, and commended its openness in combatting bird flu. She said lapses in reporting bird flu cases mostly happened at the village level, where people have struggled to confirm infections.
"China is prepared to act and play its role as a major country," she said. "And one of the reasons for nominating me as a candidate for the post is because they would like to make a greater contribution to global public health."
But Thomas Abraham, author of Twenty-first Century Plague: The Story of SARS, said China still lacks transparency.
"It's not an open system yet, and I think they have a long way to go. Information about disease is still something that you can only publish if it's officially announced," said Abraham, a journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong.
So far, Chan's main rival in the race for the WHO's director is Japan's Shigeru Omi, the WHO's director for the Western Pacific.
Chan, who earned her medical degree from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, joined the Hong Kong Department of Health in 1978 and has spent most of her career in administration.
Perhaps her biggest strong point is that she's one of the few health officials in the world with experience fighting two outbreaks of new and deadly diseases: bird flu in 1997 and SARS in 2003. Most recently, she was WHO's point person for bird flu as an assistant director-general for the WHO.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion