An honest question, how do you feel about the WHO? I personally have severe distrust in them, at least the leadership. They have show they are heavily influenced by China, and that should be enough to remove them. They really botched early covid.
In my limited experience, the WHO, like many NGOs/multi-lateral bodies, is full of intelligent, motivated people dedicated to their mission. Those people aren’t motivated by money, but are motivated by prestige and recognition. China pulled those levers well for the last several years, the US didn’t, but i don’t know of a fundamental reason why the US can’t return to its traditional place of influence if it tries.
Should the US (or China) sign a multi lateral treaty requiring it to deliver vaccines and other health resources to more vulnerable citizens of other countries ahead of some or all of its own citizens? I don’t know. Is the WHO worth having around, even in a flawed or even semi-hostile state? Yes.
> Flawed, but better than not having a WHO. IMO China’s influence is more because they did a great job at committing hard to diplomacy and working relationships at WHO at the exact same time the US pulled away. It turns out diplomacy and leadership matter.
Yeah, exactly. It's weird, but for things like this it seems the complainers often actually cause the things they complain about (e.g. create a void, then complain when a competitor fills that void). It's understandable because this stuff is often hard to perceive at a general-interest level, but that doesn't excuse it.
This seems completely revisionist to me. You really think China’s influence was justified in January and February 2020? This is before Trump first criticized the WHO (early April 2020). The US was funding 15% of the WHO’s overall budget, more than twice as much as the next nearest country (the UK), and more than 70x what China funded. What exact levers did China pull “for the last several years” that the US didn’t? It seems to me like the US did far more to support the WHO than anyone else.
They also did good, like getting PCR testing available worldwide on a compressed timescale. But let’s not pretend that the good didn’t come with a healthy helping of truly terrible decisions along the way. Enough to make some healthy skepticism seem prudent.
> They also point to conflicts over the lack of transparency and information sharing, particularly by China.
Right. The problem is not the actual lack of transparency but rather "conflicts over the lack of transparency." And no, I do not allow that NPR writers are somehow oblivious to the distinction; they mean exactly what is written.
> Some countries were accused of hoarding of medical supplies.
WHO shall decide how little medical supply the US is allowed to buy or keep.
> Then when vaccines were finally developed, poorer nations have complained that they weren't shared equitably.
WHO shall decide how long the US is made to wait for vaccine.
> A final concern, the experts say: The global response to the crisis is led by an underfunded World Health Organization that has no power to force any nation to do anything.
Give WHO more money. Give WHO more power. No assurances that performance will be any less abysmal are to be expected.
Should make a nice photo op when Biden signs it.
It seems to be that the intellectual property is more pertinent than the total export volume to "poorer nations."
By definition, these groups are political though. Almost none of them conduct their own studies, relying almost entirely on what the manufacturers provide them. And all of them have limited practical ability and experience to actually enforce their guidelines. What are they are exceptionally good at though is reviewing submitted trials and monitoring for adverse effects. Some people get hurt when dangerous products are given pre-approval / full-approval, but this is mitigated by quick recalls / banning.
So to your question, political bodies likes the FDA's are a benefit to the greater populace and by extension the medical community. Keeping the obvious scams and harmful products out of general reach from the population is a pretty clear positive.
Actually sample testing new and existing products against guidelines as well as being an active participant in trials would go a long way towards moving the FDA from being "paper-pushers" towards a more hands-on regulatory body.
They should also have enough expertise in-house to not rely on lobbists and industry experts for new regulations, when these outside forces by nature have competing interests.
Straight abolishing any part of it without proposing a substitute doesn't strike me as being in the best interests of society.
Yes, so that the supplements industry can run amok on an unsuspecting public. No really, that's just what we need, especially now.
It’s (2) that is the problem. With informed consent, you should be allowed to put whatever you want in your body without going to jail. It’s your body.
The first 6 months the WHO basically lied to everyone.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?s=21
We knew it was transmissible in December of 2019.
- what is their mission?
- how are they funded?
- how are they staffed?
- what is their scope?
- what happens if you don't comply?
- how do they measure success?
- what meaningful actions have they taken during the pandemic and in the past that has made the world a better place than if they didn't exist at all?
In general I understand the case for the "one world health" approach, but my anti-authoritarian instinct is wary of building global governing institutions that bypass democratic representation.
I also want to point out to the people that complain about the Chinese influence .. it's disingenuous to ignore that the WHO was conceived as an extension of USA global influence, and has operated that way for decades. No one sounds that alarm as long as its "their guy" in charge.
This was famously made public by the Belarusian president in September:
> In this news, Lukashenko did not state that the IMF offered him a bribe. He only explained that, as a condition of providing Covid-19 emergency funds, the IMF demanded the implementation of quarantine, isolation, and curfews.
That quote is from a fact check trying to debunk conspiracy theories about the IMF: https://cekfakta.tempo.co/fakta/1008/fakta-atau-hoaks-benark...
I believe it is entirely reasonable to condition pandemic funds on taking actions against the pandemic.
Also I believe there are many reasons to deny foreign funds to the Belarus of today.
You think it's okay for NGOs to create a catastrophic economic situation causing many nation's markets to become dependent on relief funding, then having said NGOs put agenda focused conditions on the relief they provide? You don't see this as a common strategy of extortion?
I feel like you'd rationalize business "security" provided by the mafia as something good if saying otherwise conflicted with your worldview in some way. Next you'll buy into a Ponzi scheme and start extolling the virtues of pyramidal finance structures.
Thank you for the mind reading, the fortune telling, the portrait you have drawn. Your clairvoyance knows no limmits. Should I expect a biography next?
They are incompetent.
1. They blindly repeated the CCP’s claims that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t seem to exhibit human to human transmission, as late as mid-January 2020. Remember, there were widespread reports of a pneuomonia-like illness in Wuhan in December. We later learned that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized as early as November. China’s own formal notice to WHO of the outbreak was done at the end of December. Around a week after the WHO provided broken guidance, China publicly announced that there is human to human transmission, and it still took the WHO a week past that to correct their guidance. I just don’t see how the WHO could possibly provide such broken guidance so late and for so long.
2. They allowed the CCP to escape accountability for over a year with their site visit in early 2021. I know they can’t force their way in and rely on UN member states for “power” but I feel like they were willing to happily ignore the possibility of a lab leak instead of pushing hard for a timely investigation on site (applying pressure publicly and seeking help from other nations). After their brief site visit in 2021, Tedros (head of WHO) seemed very ready to rule out a lab leak, and only a small set of brave scientists and investigative journalists have allowed this theory to return to legitimacy and receive the attention it deserves despite being shouted down by the “trust the science” crowd.
3. The WHO has not used their authority/weight as an institution in helpful ways. For example, they have pushed back against travel bans and other such measures that would at least buy countries time. At the end of January 2020, Tedros literally said there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade”. More recently, the WHO has repeatedly claimed that countries seeking to protect their own people first are “hoarding” vaccines, which is absurd.
4. The WHO seems to be very deeply political. Whether it is about sparing the CCP from scrutiny or following “woke” protocol on how to name viruses and variants, they simply don’t feel like a neutral organization. The phrase “trust the science” is so overused that it is essentially meaningless, but the WHO is one of those very organizations that make me think that what we have come to call “science” is very prone to political corruption. They also seem to regularly put China’s interests ahead of the US, despite the US providing 15% of the WHO’s funding (China funds 0.21%).
5. There are other issues with WHO from before COVID. They were simply not as apparent since they didn’t affect Americans. Look at the 2014 Ebola outbreak and how the WHO handled it - by their own admission, they were completely incompetent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_virus_ep...).
That's pretty easy to criticize from the sidelines. At the same time: if the pandemic had been much milder you would be here ranting about how the WHO got it all wrong again and they cried wolf for no particular reason if only to grab more power, make money for big pharma with unused vaccines and managed to scare us all for nothing.
They can't do it right, it's always going to be too much or too little, and it's always the same groups complaining about this.
Except they didn't. Enough countries managed to largely contain covid pre-delta based on WHO information that was provide by PRC. Information that was timely relative to how slow many countres implemented basic epidemiologic containment strategies after the fact. Some despite having capability to implement such strategies, and many who unfortunately never had the capability but simply never had a chance considering covid spread before PRC detection. WHO didn't do perfectly, but they did enough considering circumstances. As for influence, PRC influence is commiserate relative to geopolitical power - there isn't a feasible global governance structure where PRC interests won't be accounted for. Otherwise PRC wouldn't have been incentivized to handle covid relatively responsibly compared to SARS.
If the CCP spent more time being open and honest and less time arresting people for talking about covid and documenting it this would probably have ended up better than they are now.
Even now the CCP propaganda is still trying to convince Twitter and Facebook users that covid started with deer in the US.
>Even now the CCP propaganda is still trying to convince Twitter and Facebook users that covid started with deer in the US.
And? Of course CCP is going to tit-for-tat origin propaganda started by US. This treaty will no doubt attempt tackle the politicization of pandemics in the future, but likely to no avail.
NZ and Taiwan didn't follow WHO in the early days. Going against all the recommendations of the WHO of not using masks, not closing boarders, not locking down. And both countries did super well at controlling the pandemic.
> CCP quarantined entire province of Wuhan, they did more than enough to buy time for any country with capability to execute competent containment.
The CCP welded people into their apartments, boxed them up in metal boxes and shipped them off to quarentine, dragged them out of their homes. The whole time lying about the number of cases, and the seriousness. They shut down domestic travel and stopped incoming international flights. But allowed outgoing international flights while calling anyone who stopped flights from China racist.
> And? Of course CCP is going to tit-for-tat origin propaganda started by US.
There was no propaganda started by the US. The lab theory started in Asia in the Janurary. It wasn't until the US/Trump mentioned it that it got shutdown as a conspiracy by Trump.
They followed the basic test/trace/isolate advocated by WHO seriously, mask was additional prevention layer from basic common sense that Asians including PRC already were doing. BTW PRC was also advocating mask wearing in their "propaganda". TW itself got a chance to act early due to warning by PRC doctors due to cross strait connections. Same info avail to west via backchannels. Again, import case statistics from TW/NZ demonstrated PRC exported less than a few hundred cases to these places TOTAL, which would have been completely managable with a competent isolation system. The entire time they had continous repatriation flights from PRC, as did many other countries that handled covid well directly as result of CCP handling covid well.
> The whole time lying about the number of cases, and the seriousness.
Yet you list actions of how CCP took covid MORE seriously then and now than basically anyone else. Again import case statistics from "transparent" nations demonstrated early covid numbers in Wuhan/Hubei were completely managable -TW,SK,Singapore,AU,NZ,CA all released import case stats daily, and PRC essentially stopped exporting cases a few cases after Hubei lockdown. There's a reason vast number of patient zero and import cases in most of the world came from western countries who didn't take epidemic prevention seriously. PRC did her part, include blocking outbound flight early, except repatriation flights, because you know, they can't keep foreign citizens trapped in country. And the countries that didn't take screening fucked themselves, i.e. countries that just took quarantine theatre temperature checks while letting folks go home with little followup. Their profound lack of seriousness turned a managable situation unmanagable.
> There was no propaganda started by the US.
Politicized by Tom Cotton and republican peers in early Feburary i.e. endorsed by US political establishment before PRC formally responded with Fort Detrick campaign. Doesn't matter how MSM treat it as conspiracy, it was formal propaganda position drive initiated by republicans, supported at the highest level of office, including campaigns by lying Pompeo.
No. TW started inspecting flights from Wuhan before the WHO even did anything. NZ blocked inbound flights while the WHO was figuring out what to do.
> TW itself got a chance to act early due to warning by PRC doctors due to cross strait connections.
No. Taiwan heard whispers of SARS/Unknown pneumonia and reacted accordingly.
> Again, import case statistics from TW/NZ demonstrated PRC exported less than a few hundred cases to these places TOTAL
No. NZ closed its border to China in Feb. TW closed its border for flights from Wuhan. China stopped domestic flights from Wuhan but continued to allow flights out of Wuhan. This has nothing to do with "they can't keep foreign citizens trapped in country", because 1) they can and 2) they do.
> Yet you list actions of how CCP took covid MORE seriously then and now than basically anyone else.
So you agree that welding people into their apartments is a good approach to controlling the virus?
> Politicized by Tom Cotton and republican peers in early Feburary
It was a valid theory, and still is. Was never a conspiracy theory to anyone but the left. While nothing from the PRC has been anything other than propaganda conspiracy theory. The lab leak theory should have been taken seriously in the beginning when it was theorized at the beginning of Jan.
>1) they can and 2) they do
For breaking PRC laws, not epidemic prevention. At end of day, countries wanted to repatriate and PRC obliged. It's asinine to suggest PRC can with hold foreign nationals, as if that won't spark a completely different kind of outrage. Obviously said criminals who broke PRC laws weren't repatriated. TW citizens from Wuhan was repatriated via rail to Shanghai. TW CDC had up to date release of repatriation flights and positives. Up till Aprial, TW repatraitaed about ~1000 out of Wuhan with 1 testing positive on an early Feburary flight. That's it. Because Hubei lock down was that effective.
> good approach to controlling the virus
Covid-0 strategy is probably the right one for PRC. More importantly it demonstrates containing covid was absolutely a viable. But other relatively milder intervention stratgies also possible as seen in other successful countries that adhered to basic WHO guidelines who didn't resort to PRC tier interventions. They were just slightly less successful. Even TW response barely ranks well when measured against other PRC provinces. Taking pandemic response seriously is correlated to serious results should not be shocking.
> was a valid theory
About as valid as Fort Detrick at the time (and now). Point is early lab leak propaganda was just that, propaganda designed to policized for Sino-US rivalry when origin tracing hasn't even begun and hampered subsequent efforts. PRC position has always been to let science handle origin tracing which in terms of propaganda is tame. Reality apart from delays around two-sessions in Jan PRC has provided more than enough info and signals for most serious actors to contain covid19 depite virus already spreading abroad prior to two-sessions or detection of market cluster. Or that there's still zero indication covid19 originated in PRC vs PRC discovering first cluster. Lot's of valid theories out there, but what gets pushed by whom and when and for what purpose is how things get politicized and what treaty is designed to mitigate.
At the end of the day CCP + WHO did fine, because those that took them seriously (like actually seriously) did Ok. Those that didn't, burned and have been looking for escape goats to their own failure.