Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What they did these last months should be the last nail in the coffin.
More like a health organization they act like a political one taking sides with China and ignoring/censoring Taiwan even if they managed to control de spread of the virus.[1][2]
And if that wasn't enough, they actively insisted that all the measures we're taking now were pointless.
Why would anyone want a health organization that only cares about politics?
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/28/taiwan-who-coronavirus-... [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-who-coronavir...
Of course everybody benefits from the existence of an organ like WHO, the only problems would be the number and quality of its experts network and labs. And to reform that, that's in the opposite direction of stopping funds...
Give it a week. Two at the most. You’ll see changes at the headline level.
It is right that WHO should have waited more verification of scientific data before publishing easily misinterpreted too-short statements, on Twitter or elsewhere. But look who is denouncing that.
Why? Does it do anything beyond encourage groupthink? What does it do that other organisations cannot?
From a life long Conservative voter here in the UK, this is serious. Get a grip. I never thought Trump was funny, but _nobody_ is laughing any more. US Republicanism needs to face up to the fact it took a badly wrong turn with this guy.
Wouldn’t you want to defund any organization that makes a problem worse?
This is classic Trump. Instead of taking effective action, he’s picking a fight because he knows his supporters will rally round, his opponents will be enraged and now it’s a partisan bun fight. De-funding the WHO is an appalling attack on the worlds ability to fight this pandemic. What is Trumps plan to actually help solve this problem?
Ah, this is a typical conservative response. "The government responded ineffectively!" they will say, to which the only possible response is to simply start dismantling government institutions and replace them with their corporate friends.
Then, when the next crisis occurs, and the even further weakened public institutions struggle to respond, they can remind us that they were right all along - it is the institutions that have failed us! Etc etc, into the downward spiral.
"Starve the beast" is not a strategy that can possibly result in reform, and I have trouble believing that anybody advocating it believes it in good faith.
Not true. Taiwan had already warned them of human to human transmission in December. The WHO's failure to report it has cost the world many lives and a great deal of suffering: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/03/25/2...
Well, you're right that physicians directly emailing other physicians is a good source for being cautious about China declarations, especially under an authoritarian government not allowing other forms of publications.
But still, from the point of view of WHO, it was not clear that there was such a pressure on experts. They only had China's studies in hands.
PS: well, maybe there was something more political going on. You seem well documented and I believe you. But they had to play with China on their side. Changing that means huge reforms, of not only WHO but UN. And reforms, not deletions...
In an outbreak situation, the correct response is NOT to say, "until you've published a study we'll tell the world there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission". If multiple doctors are getting sick from their patients, there IS evidence of human-to-human transmission.
If those doctors are in an authoritarian country that controls the flow of information, but they've emailed their colleagues abroad, that information itself must be shared by any responsible health organization.
Did Taiwan try to publish directly? On social media or other.
cite please.
This is all bullshit that Trump (and his self certified visionary crew) want people to focus on, so no one really asks what useful outcomes have the Whitehouse actually produced over the last 4 years? I cant see one thing.
After all, the WHO Director-General claimed within the last week without a shred of evidence that he was subject to racist and derogatory attacks from Taiwan's leaders.
This is after WHO threw Taiwan under the bus and denied them access to critical health information on the express orders from China.
The entire organization is corrupt. Blindly repeating CCP propaganda and punishing China's enemies is not the sign of a healthy organization.
Their recommendations were, at times, completely false.
I see a lot of these deformed affirmations...
The China "results" were actually biased, so Taiwan was right to ask verification, but that's only retrospectively. At the time, there was no such certainty of their wrongdoing, especially given that they also collaborated by other means.
The reason you didn't find much is that the WHO refused to pass on Taiwan's warning.
Taiwanese doctors had direct emails from multiple colleagues in Wuhan, some of whom were punished by the local government for speaking. Doctors getting sick with the virus was direct evidence of human to human transmission.
Keep in mind that China also covered up and denied the existence of SARS for months. The WHO's decision to aid in suppressing the information of the epidemic has cost the entire globe countless lives and economic damage. What is it that so motivates you to defend them that you comment 20 times in this thread?
FWIW, I've followed the news this time and during SARS from the start, from local media in Taiwan and been deeply disappointed with the WHO and early international reporting both times.
Also, I like supra-national bodies. They warrant that the non-zero sum game that is our planet and societies still live on...
PS: did Taiwan try to pass the warning directly? They could have published through other ways, Twitter being only one among numerous examples. This is a sincere question, not a trap.
The crucial contribution the WHO made was forcing the Chinese to revise their reporting system and publish accurate infection counts in mid January. They could only do that once they had a team on the ground working with the Chinese and that required Chinese cooperation. Up to that point they and we were utterly reliant on China for information.
Does the idea of improving the WHO by withholding money come from some kind of shared "starving the beast" logic or is it just a revenge kind of reflex that doesn't even have any positive expected outcome?
Eg the travel restrictions position[1], taken as an example in the article, appears to have been be defensible and a mainstream position in the field. It may turn out to be wrong or not in hindsight, like many things in this pandemic, but it's no reason to try to harm the organisation.
[1] "Evidence shows that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations" in February, https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
Also, it they think the WHO was not good, the US should, as a huge contributor (which means bringing a lot of US experts and administrators to the organ), point to solutions to improve it. Deciding to cut the funds is completely illogical.
China will offcourse make up the difference, and appropriately gain more influence. As it rightly should.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
The WHO also isn't really doing anything on the ground (besides finger waving countries into giving them billions of dollars).
Their legacy is delay, confusion, misinformation, outright lies and incompetence.
The WHO had developed a test kit, was distributing it and was helping countries ramp up production at a time when the US was making a complete mess of testing. Many third world countries are heavily dependent on WHO expertise and support. This move is a knife in their backs.
Honestly, who has the best track record of tackling this issue and taking it seriously. The WHO, or a man who was calling it a hoax 6 weeks after the WHO had alerted of possible international transmission?
Taiwan, who the WHO regularly denies exists.
South Korea, whose success and strategies have been ignored.
This crisis has shown us the true face of the WHO: a primarily political organization with occasional work in medicine.
The WHO published summaries and support for the South Korean approach to the virus on 21 January, particularly highlighting their approach to testing and contact tracing and recommending similar approaches elsewhere. The WHO then started providing technical expertise to help countries set up testing and contact tracing systems, especially in poorer countries without that knowhow.
What was Trump doing, was he setting up a G20 summits to co-ordinate the global response like George Bush did during the financial crisis in 2008? Taking a role of global leadership? Nope, more than 5 weeks later while the WHO was leading efforts to track and contain the virus, Trump was still calling the whole thing a hoax at a mass rally in the US.
Trump can throw blame wherever he likes, you can pick nits in the activities of organisations that have been at the forefront of actually tackling this crisis. Whatever. But de-funding the WHO right now is a disgusting and reprehensible attack on the world's ability to tackle this crisis, from a country that was instrumental is setting up and running the WHO and it's predecessors for more than 100 years.
I'm curious, how are you so certain about this?
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful...
you should read the guidelines because i find your newly created username to be disturbing.
Easier to ignore the WHO if you don't give them any money.
Either thing not happening (along with countless others) would have been best.
Swapping in Trump and Kushner for WHO is not an improvement.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china...
"Tedros, as he is called, said the WHO does not recommend limiting either trade or travel to China at this time. “In fact, we oppose it,” he said. The health organization said it would question border closures, quarantining of airplane passengers who aren’t ill, and similar steps."
This organization is either totally incompetent or complicit with spreading CCP propaganda. In fact, they reacted significantly slower than the US government.
South Korea never issued a travel ban.
In order for a travel ban to be effective, it has to be for all incoming travelers. Not just for a specific country.
This is not true. A ban on a specific country cannot eliminate the risk but it can still slow the spread just like any mitigation.
there are plenty of models that quarantining the source only does not work. china even proved this. the initial quarantine of wuhan only was not working, so they had to expand it to everywhere. south korea showed testing and tracking worked better than shutting down travel.
the u.s. travel ban against china was ineffective. however, it will now continue indefinitely because the u.s. is in the middle of a shit show, and this will continue to harm people and businesses affected by the travel ban. it will add months if not years of delays to visa processing everywhere.
That's not all experts, though, many of them still wear their mask in front of the camera.
> It is an open secret among international diplomats and public health experts that WHO is “not fit for mission” (as one of them put it to me), riddled with politics and bureaucracy. Given its previous failures and the warning that was Sars, its leadership has no excuse for reacting so oddly, and so tardily, to the current crisis.
Perhaps. However, Trump's using the WHO as scapegoat for his grievous mishandling of the situation - starting in 2018 - is beyond unscrupulous.
Also, how is Trump responsible for Italy and Spain? Or are you so xenophobic that you believe that only the US could possibly have handled this for them? Italy and Spain listened to the WHO and they suffered and continue to suffer because of it. Trump didn't completely listen to the WHO and saved lives. Now, maybe he should have closed things down earlier and followed the Taiwan and South Korea models, but those countries did well because they didn't listen to the WHO and knew China was lying because of the last flu outbreak.
Do I think Trump is doing A+ work, no, but I can see that the US is doing much better than many other countries. And when you say that Trump is doing a bad job, you do realize that there are teams of people working on this. So you are saying that everyone who's working on this crisis is mishandling everything? If it's only Trump, what do you think he did wrong? You might say he downplayed the pandemic, but everyone did. And if you think that, what should he have said? It's easy to use hindsight and say people did these things wrong. I think everyone is doing the best they can.
I'm really tired of seeing this criticism with no evidence and with other countries that clearly did a worse job. I don't think it's fair to blame the leaders of those other countries either, when it's pretty clear that China and the WHO deserve a lot of the blame.
The WHO is not a scapegoat, they are directly responsible for thousands of deaths, and untold suffering. They may have done it because of their close ties to China, and they may have believed what they were saying, but at this point would you trust anything they say?
It is quite clear that the WHO have to placate the CCP in order to avoid China withdrawing it's cooperation in its entirety. Yes, China has not been fully transparent, but it has been a significant improvement from SARS in 2003.
It seems many people here have bought into the reactionary blame game and failed to consider the diplomacy requirements of a group who need to cooperate with as many countries as possible to be effective.
Also, this move is 100% Trump deflecting attention from the narrative of his own mis-management. He doesn't care about WHO, he probably didn't even know it existed until a few weeks ago.
But, I'd go so far as to say that I hope this reduces the rest of the World's reliance on China once and for all as we have seen the perils it has caused, which incidentally has also been a narrative of his. Although that really hasn't come to fruition despite all the trade war rhetoric, so I'd say he has failed and not gone far enough.
Retraining people in this time is perhaps the most opportune as well as as they're confined at Home.
Also, I don't know how close you've been following the manufacturing of respirators or medical PPE in the US, but its like people finally realized 3d printers can be used for more than pointless affections and have been repurposed to be used for medical supplies equipment and tools and have brought out the best in what the 'maker space' could be under the guidance of actual Medical professionals.
There are guys on imgur who are reaching out to front liners to provide them with the equipment they can't get elsewhere at no cost.
Its a do or die situation for those so heavily reliant on them for medical supplies, quite literately, as untold deaths will go unaccounted for because China sent low quality or totally faulty equipment if it was even available to begin with. It will be brushed under the unavoidable cost of a pandemic--that has been made worse because the CCP censored, and disappeared anyone who sought to speak out on the severity of COVID19.
Which should have grave consequences internationally.
"The World Health Organization adopted the German recipe for manufacturing kits sent to low-income countries without the resources to develop their own. The German recipe was published on 17 January 2020; the protocol developed by the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was not available until 28 January, delaying available tests in the U.S."
So, a German lab found the test, and WHO helped manufacturing it in low-income countries.
But, as I said in another comment (only to be downvoted), the WHO is a sum of its participating countries. So everything the WHO finds is actually from some country's lab. That's just how WHO is made.
According to Merriam-Webster[1]:
«proactive» · acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes
To solve that, a reform is needed. But absolutely not by cutting its funds, which is silly.
The exact quote was: "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test."
My fav useless tweet from WHO is "there's no evidence human human transmission". I mean, if you don't know for sure, then let's not announce it.
As far as I know, most countries are ramping their testing facilities as fast as possible, some are just more effective or had a head start.
Also, being able to test anybody who asks it would have dismissed arbitrary criteria that are pushed by governments around the world to minimize the illness. For example in the country where I am, it was until recently difficult to get tested unlike there was an established contact with a tested positive person.
Maybe a country has 1000 tests on hand, they test that first 1k people and can say they followed the WHO's advice. That's all that was possible given their immediate stock.
You do realize you linked to a January 14th tweet by the WHO stating:
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.
What exactly did they do?
I think that was the point. They didn't do anything of real substance, so was it better than doing nothing?
To me, it appears equivalent to doing nothing, and that's not better than doing nothing...
Yes easily misinterpreted short-phrased tweets are bad. Thanks to US president, we learned that.
The equivalent yet still factually correct statement is "covid maybe transmits between humans". When you add uncertainty to a statement, it becomes factually correct.
In this case, doing nothing would have been better.
They published a status of non-knowledge, easily misinterpreted. And sometimes later they published more alarmist statuses. It is quite normal to be wrong sometimes, even in science-related establishments.
I was just responding to the comment above mine, which asked "what did they do", and tried to show that was probably the point the poster above that was making.
As to the main topic? I mostly think this is just more petty distraction, deflection, and pointing fingers. But, I do think it's worth considering what the WHO's purpose is and whether or not it's serving that purpose sufficiently. As to how I feel about cutting funds, I'm not sure yet...
> While the WHO was obliged to report on the latest findings of a member state at the source of the outbreak, its officials told their counterparts in technical briefings on 10 and 11 January, and briefed the press on 14 January, that human-to-human transmission was still a strong possibility given the experience of past coronavirus epidemics and urged suitable precautions.
> [Gavin Yamey, the director of Duke University’s center for policy impact in global health] said it was ridiculous to point to a single tweet early in the pandemic as the fixed position of the WHO. “The whole point of science is that we have initial hypotheses and initial ideas, and we update those ideas as more and more data emerges,” he said.
(From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/trump-turns-...)
If orgs/people are punishable due to single tweets, how do you rate Trump's performance? He has several tweets that contributed to 25K deaths..
Cut his funding!
It was certainly better than Trump calling the disease a hoax concocted by the his political opponents including the media, so whatever problems WHO may have on COVID-19 response, Donald Trump is in no position to criticize.
An example, WHO really said:
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission"
which is realistic and prudent. But in this thread an in every other place on internet, it is interpreted by US people as:
"there is no human-to-human transmission"
which is downright crazy.
Also, I see a lot of mixing with Taiwan issues, even though the particular data about the pandemics in this country (and yes I am in favor of Taiwan independence, but that does not matter, and that's my point) did not change at all the scientific and public health conclusions and advises to be taken. In other words, to do their public health job, the WHO had absolutely no need to quote Taiwan in particular. Of course they also considered not angering China and so refrained to speak of Taiwan because of that too, but it would be the same for any of the UNO Security Council countries' delicate issues, including US.
If WHO was to be rebuilt upon better bases, everybody would benefit from it. But cutting its funds?? It's stupid.
PS: another point, UNO scientific organs really are just the sum of their individual countries' parts. It should not, it should be larger and better than its parts, but that's just not the case. Their is no "WHO laboratory" etc, there are just specialists from participating countries that share their own labs data (or not). To change that, it would need more funding (not less!) to own its own labs, facilities, research programs, etc.
The WHO seems to compensate partly for the absence of universal healthcare in the poorest countries, by direct investment.
I suspect that it is also directed towards communication and information. Like teaching the developping world the known techniques to mitigate malaria, the primary hygienic gestures's importance (like using soap to wash hands), etc. And of course the importance to have protected sex to fend off AIDS, etc. (which is an upstream battle given the religious and traditions resistance to many of these advises)
Like when the Republicans wasted billions of dollars promoting abstinence as the solution to AIDS:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/05/03/4766011...
The AIDS projects from WHO would never dare consider abstinence. They already have the hardest job countering all the traditions and superstitions, even for the simplest thing as not to kiss the dead relatives, so how could they succeed in asking people not to have sex?
This is like saying the governors should be ceding control to the federal administration.
In this universe though, the Trump admin didn't contribute anything to the WHO (I'm assuming), and is now bitching and moaning that they were ineffective...
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/trump-turns-...:
> Announcing the cut in funding on Tuesday, Trump accused the WHO of failing to send its experts to the source of the outbreak to gather samples. That failure decisively set back the effect to contain the pandemic, he claimed.
> In fact Beijing blocked a WHO delegation from visiting Wuhan in the first weeks of the outbreak. The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had to fly to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping on 29 January to negotiate entry and information sharing. A WHO team was allowed to visit Wuhan on 22 February.
Mass quarantines for millions in a few cities and rapid shipment of medical equipment, personnel and the building of treatment facilities for the province.
You need to be a pretty piss poor govt to only base your preperations on WHO press releases or worse yet Chinese media reports.
Trump is just looking for a scapegoat as usual.
So what?
The virus is called COVID-19 for a reason. The virus was discovered in 2019. Each country can do their own thing.
Trump shut down international travel from China. He should have shut down travel from everywhere.
Once that virus was out of the bag, then it became impossible to stop. How do you stop something at the beginning, that you don’t even know exists? You can only try to slow it down. To isolate the infected. And to contain it.
But once an infected person leaves the border, then the virus will replicate in the next country. You only need one person to reach exponential growth.
The WHO even stated that they think the virus was building steam in all countries all over the world, and they were correct.
Here, it seems the politicians don’t understand biological science, and they don’t listen to their experts, and that they don’t understand what exponential growth is.
Further, the CDC refused to advise Americans to wear a mask, even a cloth mask to help reduce the transmission velocity of droplets. This was a bone-headed decision, that was entirely in the realms of control of the United States.
And then, the media keeps bringing up how China silenced an eye doctor, but what would this have done? Stop the virus? Doubtful, it was already building up steam in China. Make people more cautious, and wear a mask? Maybe, but local Chinese news TV were already advising that people be careful and vigilant, and wear a mask when outside. But not everyone was following that advice.
In contrast, what happened in New York, when rumors got out that the governor was shutting down the state? The result was that people fled to distant states! Some went to Rhode Island, and others went to Florida. Remember, all you need is one infected person to mess it up for everyone.
But really, I think what impacted the United States the most, was when Trump announced the travel ban from Europe. Everyone flocked home, and there were no health checks. The virus was already building up slowly, but this was the catalyst that accelerated it.