WHO says cut in funding by the U.S. will affect Africa greatly
africafeeds.com
africafeeds.com
Maybe some European projects? But I guess we will keep sending Tshirts and cheaper milk instead to further undermine African local economies.
AID to Africa has largely has been an unintended yet sad disaster. The best example of this is when the British were leaving East Africa in the 1960's they, reasonably, decided to administer the polio vaccine widely. Likely this massively furthered the spread of AIDS, which is thought to have crossed from monkeys to humans sometime in the early 1950s.
[1] - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n07/edward-hooper/aids-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPV_AIDS_conspiracy_theory
You can still find articles seeming to espouse the hypothesis on several sites, but from what I've seen they are all quite old and poorly sourced, with no follow up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS
For the most part the consensus agrees that the colonial period in Africa likely induced conditions that caused SIV to develop into HIV, and likely more than once.
Humans can get infected with SIV albeit they don’t develop AIDS from it and their viral load drops quite rapidly which makes purely sexual transmission unlikely. SIV has been known to be quite effective at jumping species through serial transmission during the acute phases with as little as 3 hosts needed until it can effectively infect other species however direct SIV to HIV evolution has never been observed.
So for the most part while HIV has likely emerged in the late 19th century the colonial era which introduced urbanization, increase in trade, slave labor conditions, GUD causing STIs and mass injection campaigns is what pushed HIV’s pandemic emergence.
That said it’s not clear what would’ve have happened if these conditions weren’t present or simply delayed HIV might still have emerged through globalization and the general conditions set by the latter half of the 20th century.
Ironically the emergence of HIV and AIDS in the west has been instrumental in pushing viral epidemiology research and the development of antiviral treatments and protocols to the front stage and between the late 80’s and early 2000’s huge progress and advancements have been made.
I personally believe that without a viral disease that can and does infect the rich and the powerful which causes them to slowly die over decades while drastically effecting their quality of life, life style and mental health we might have been 2 decades behind on viral research compared to today if not more.
Throughout the entire Trump presidency the US has been straining or severing ties with their allies under the guise of "America first".
Hell, I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if he'd announce that the US would be leaving the UN next week.
At least the US are taking it seriously now. China and the WHO alerted the world that this wasn't a regular flu variant since before January.
On a related topic, thanks to their totalitarian government, China controlled the pandemic effectively, and will recover its economy faster. The US will resort to more commercial war to level up the field.
The reason why the funding cut has happened is obvious.
But this "Just-world hypothesis" by everyone else is just annoying.
WHO did pretty good considering. They are simply not going to be fast moving with unknowns.
We all had the info, we didn't need them to hold our hand and call it a pandemic. We didn't need them to tell us to wear masks. If we wanted to complain about WHO and Taiwan we should have done it last year, now is not the time.
We failed ourselves. And we still are failing ourselves. Simple things we should be doing are still not happening.
They weren't just slow, WHO helped spread false and misleading information, and one of their main reasons for existence is to combat this. If WHO can't be trusted as a source of information, what are they good for?
> If we wanted to complain about WHO and Taiwan
I only just found out about this, now the spotlight is on them. Now is exactly the time, as the main complaint is that the WHO has political motivations that interfere with its main objectives, and this is evidence of that - doubly relevant because if Taiwan weren't being ignored, other countries might handled it as well as they did.
During a video interview with Radio Television Hong Kong journalist Yvonne Tong (唐若韞) on Saturday (March 28), Aylward claimed not to have heard her question about whether the WHO would consider Taiwan’s membership. When the journalist tried to repeat the question, the WHO official asked her to "move on to another one."
After Tong insisted on getting Aylward’s comment on the Taiwan issue, the advisor appears to have ended the call without notice.
If we get the governments of the world to acknowledge Taiwan then yes, the WHO should follow suit. However, barely any countries acknowledge Taiwan as a nation and the WHO is part of the UN.
The person being interviewed handled the situation very badly, but it's stupid to expect Taiwan to be part of the WHO until at least the United States, the EU and Russia officially acknowledge it as well.
Just for context, I've been on conversations in a state healthcare agency in a US state that where adapting to an incentive provision in federal law was dismissed on the basis that doing so would delay achieving more immediate state priorities for only on the order of a couple hundred million of federal funding.
Annual federal (not total, or even national public just federal government) spending on health is over $1 trillion; $400 million seems like a lot of money on an individual basis but it's not, in that context, even a meaningful amount.