The U.S. is withdrawing from the World Health Organization

Definitely.

Can you double check the source I linked? I did and it contradicts with the wikipedia which is weird.

Eradication of smallpox was indeed an achievement, however, it was also many decades ago. The modern WHO is different people.

In more recent times, there is a history of problematic behaviour, like changing their own definition of pandemic specifically so they could declare one for a trivial disease (Swine Flu) and then lying about having done so, although archive.org remembers all:

https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/05/world-health-organization-...

All - please help verify the source I linked above if you can. Take it with a grain of salt for now.

What you see across the world is that the population's behaviour is generally ahead of whatever rules or recommendations governments are coming up with. People figure out the risks to themselves and others faster than governments do because the latter are incentivised (or believe they are incentivised) to take a safety über alles approach, and are very easily pushed around by "experts" and journalists, in ways that smaller groups aren't.

Eliminating the CDC - I don't think the CDC has been particularly useful in this event either. Frankly as far as I am concerned governments have made what is now obviously a perfectly normal and trivial virus drastically worse, to the extent that we'd be far better off as a world, and far healthier as a population, if governments had literally done nothing at all. But doing nothing is paradoxically the hardest thing for any government to do. The best way to bring about that outcome is thus to just clear out organisations and government agencies that would otherwise following a road of, "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done", which seems to explain a good 90% of the lockdown absurdities I see on a daily basis.

But:

> As for whether they're part of China - that's also a political thing.

Yes and no. No, they are not currently part of China. You have two separate governments, neither of which is subordinate to the other. Therefore neither one is part of the other. That's the de facto reality. It's not ambiguous, it's not subjective, and it's not open to interpretation.

But yes, it's political in that both sides claim a de jure unity - they just disagree about who's in charge of it. And it's political for everybody else, because they can't side with Taiwan without upsetting China, and they aren't willing to upset China.

But for China to try to pretend that the de facto situation is other than what it is... hey, we aren't blind, China. We know what the reality of the current situation is, no matter how much they try to pretend that it's something else.

This is certainly not true. WHO lawyer gave later lengthy explanation of WHO position on Taiwan on a press conference and nobody cared. It wasn't the issue of Taiwan that shocked people. Everyone following news knows that UN is politically paralyzed institution.

What was shocking, to me and people I know, was the extend of fear and disingenuity of a member of WHO. He has clearly western roots and we expect from him western political culture. He is the man in authority position who we are supposed to trust. But this behavior was all but trustworthy. He was deceiving. He was laying and he was voluntarily following Chinese party line.

The reporter was not stupid, indeed. It's her job to ask difficult questions.

I applaud her for opening my eyes to the fact that I should trust WHO only about us much as I trust China.

> Look at Hong Kong. Most countries are doing nothing except making vague statements for peace, at most some are offering refuge for some who want to escape.

Again, this is something that I tend to expect. Western states have nothing to gain there and we have no obligations to these 7.5 million people.

> It shows how much power China has in general.

I guess maybe I was naive, but my a prior would be that USA would have a lot more power. The fact that western people are bowing before China in this way is new to me.

Trump did not call COVID19 a hoax. He called what Democrats said about his administration's response to the pandemic a "hoax", akin to the "impeachment hoax" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/29/joe-biden-trum...).

> https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6...

The Guardian disagrees: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/18/caught-in-a-su...

> “Why did the WHO Ignore an email from Taiwanese health officials in late December alerting them to the possibility that coronvirus could be transmitted between humans?” the president asked in a tweet on Friday, echoing a claim made by Taipei.

> However, the Taiwanese email appears to have made no such warning. It was sent from Taiwan’s CDC to its WHO liaison officer on 31 December, hours after the first official report of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan were published online.

> According to the text provided to the Guardian, the email said: “News resources today indicate that at least seven, atypical pneumonia cases were reported in China.”

> It restates the details of Chinese report, adding “I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.”

> The email did not contain new information, and certainly nothing about human-to-human transmission. The WHO had picked up the same report on the night of 30 December and was urgently seeking more information. On 1 January it activated its incident management support team, putting the organisation on an emergency footing.

I feel like this whole "it said/it said" thing with all these various organizations and their shifting messages is going to take years, at least, to disentangle.

“News sources today indicate that at least seven cases of atypical pneumonia were reported in Wuhan, China. Her health authorities responded to the media that they did not believe the cases were SARS; however, the examples are still under study and the cases were isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much for your attention in this matter. ”

The alarm was not being widely sounded by anyone but the WHO before then either. (Actual nation states DO have intelligence agencies who could have been analyzing this threat, btw).

However, on January 30th when they did sound the alarm -- countries that paid attention to this and took the threat seriously then are, still, doing much better than countries that waited months to take it seriously, or which still aren't taking it seriously. This shows that the WHO in fact did something useful.

The U.S. pulling out of the WHO is meant to distract from the fact that U.S. didn't take it seriously even when the WHO did sound the alarm, somehow blaming the WHO for the U.S. ignoring the WHO. Eliminating the WHO and having no world health organization at all wouldn't fix this problem, and would harm rather than help the global capacity for pandemic response. Perhaps they should have sent out an alarm earlier and not doing so was some kind of incomptency (I'm not convinced, but perhaps), but they still in fact played an important role and did send out the alarm far far before the U.S. paid any attention to it; sending out the alarm earlier wouldn't have made much difference for the US, we would have just had more time to ignore it.

I mean, I guess if the U.S. took the money they were giving to the WHO and instead spent it on re-funding the infectious disease monitoring and research in China that we used to fund but stopped at least that would sound like trying to improve monitoring efficacy (whether it's a wise way to do it or not), instead of just bullshit. But we all know that's the opposite of what is happening, in fact, they recently cancelled MORE US-funded research on infectious diseases in China.

If a random person wins the lottery, no one blinks an eye. If Tom Hanks and the NBA win the lottery, people start wondering if a) it's more common than they thought to win the lottery or b) the lottery is rigged, because statistically celebs should have a low chance of winning it.