Italian Dr Francesco Zambon was awarded compensation of €25,000 by an international court after it found the World Health Organisation (WHO) suppressed his Covid-19 report critical of the response to the pandemic by the Chinese and Italian governments.
Although the ruling was issued in February of this year, Italian media recently delved deeper into the case.
With the help of declassified information — released under pressure from the Brothers of Italy Party (FdI) — they discovered that Italy’s previous progressive government, in collaboration with the Chinese Communist regime, had pressured the WHO.
The report was highly critical of the “chaotic and creative” management of the Coronavirus in Italy, but it also made the WHO itself look bad, as it said the group prioritised political considerations over public health.
“As we dig into the pandemic papers, the feeling is that even the health of Italians was worth less than relations with China,” Italian daily Il Giornale wrote on August 11.
“We must support China’s great effort on Covid and take into account the economic repercussions and diplomatic relations with Beijing,” said Democratic Party former minister of health Roberto Speranza said.
Giuseppe Ippolito, scientific director of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases (INMI) Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome and director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for clinical care, diagnosis, response and training on Highly Infectious Diseases at INMI, along with Speranza, requested quarantines for Italians arriving from Wuhan but not for Chinese travellers during the outbreak of the pandemic.
That decision was reportedly influenced by the WHO’s position, which aimed to avoid accusations against China regarding the export of the transmissible disease.
In May 2020, Zambon’s team at the WHO’s Venice office published An Unprecedented Challenge: Italy’s First Response to COVID-19. The 102-page report detailed outdated preparedness plans — unchanged since 2006 despite claims of a 2016 update — and delays in Italy’s early pandemic reaction.
It also scrutinised the WHO’s co-ordination with both China and Italy in January and February 2020.
Within 24 hours, the WHO removed the report from its website.
“Immediately remove the document from the web. Consider it an emergency. This document is inaccurate and contradicts the official WHO timeline in a couple of places,” the WHO representative in China wrote to Zambon.
That was followed up with an internal email reported in the WHO’s response to the request of the Bergamo Public Prosecutor’s Office: “The WHO China office has asked us to remove the report immediately,” it read.
Zambon later alleged that WHO assistant director-general Ranieri Guerra pressured him to change findings to protect both the Italian Ministry of Health and China from criticism.
Despite Zambon’s internal complaints about what he called this unethical pressure, the WHO did not launch an investigation and no corrective action was taken.
“I was treated like a traitor,” Zambon told The Spectator in 2021.
He resigned in March 2021 after the WHO Ethics Office denied him whistleblower protection, arguing Guerra was not his direct supervisor.
On February 6, 2025, the International Labour Organisation Administrative Tribunal (ILOAT) ruled partly in Zambon’s favour.
It ordered the WHO to publish a statement distancing itself from Guerra’s public remarks about him.
The WHO had to pay 15,000 Swiss francs (€25,000) for “moral damages”.
The ILOAT, though, rejected Zambon’s claim of retaliation under whistleblower protections.
Transparency International, Whistleblower Aid and other advocacy groups condemned the ruling as a “chilling signal” for UN whistleblowers but coverage of the case remained limited to legal and specialist media.
Following criticism from advocacy groups such as Transparency International and a formal open letter during the World Health Assembly in May, the WHO acknowledged the existence of a complaint filed by Zambon in 2020 and confirmed that it was “currently under review”.
Brussels Signal reached out for a reaction but had not received a reply at the time of writing.
The renewed coverage of the affair coincided with parliamentary debates on pandemic accountability and international discussions on WHO reform.
It tapped into deep public frustration in Italy, which suffered one of the world’s highest per-capita death tolls in the early months of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Update: On August 13, Brussels Signal received a reply from the WHO which stated: “The Tribunal’s judgments are public, and the reasoning behind the award of damages to Dr Zambon is detailed in the judgment.”
