U.S. Formally Withdraws from World Health Organization
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Sad all round.
(Edit - downvoters, do you not agree that this is likely, or do you think that it's OK?
If the former, it's been done before so it seems very likely to me. If the latter then I have to say I agree with this take in scientific american - "To include TCM in the ICD is an egregious lapse in evidence-based thinking and practice."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-health-...)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-health-...
It just seems like such an undermining move to prop up an industry that anyways relies on distrust of established scientific and medical systems
2. Even if they didn't push it, the west has been stealing ("appropriating" in liberal speak) Ayurvedic remedies for years. Take turmeric for example. The GoI had to sue to keep turmeric patent free.
2. Ayurvedic and TCM largely refers to those things which haven't undergone clinical trials to understand their efficacy as prescribed medicines. Anything from that sphere which is clinically proven to work and is dispensed as prescription medicine just becomes part of medicine. It's not about "stealing" or whatever, it's about whether people should be given proven effective medicines or hopefully effective medicines, the former being what we should promote globally
Interestingly enough, RCTs of acupuncture (with sham needles) show pretty large effect sizes for many treatments but only in China, which is super weird. The most likely explanation is that the blinding doesn't work (which is a perennial problem in basically all RCTs), but it's interesting nonetheless.
Keep in mind that the Western system is not perfect either. Many good natural medicines are ignored by western countries because they have not undergone clinical trials. Why haven't they undergone clinical trials? Because that takes large amounts of money and no one is going to make that investment unless they can patent the molecule.
Of course, natural medicines that have been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years are not patentable, so no one will do a clinical trial for them. As a result, when you go to a doctor in a western country they are completely ignorant about natural medicines and will only prescribe drugs pushed by big pharma.
The Ramdevs and Patanjalis of the world could easily afford to do this and would boost their sales 100x if they could. They already sell unpatentable remedies and powders with great profit (but decamp to Western hospitals when they are actually sick)
Doctors test for deficiencies in vitamins and minerals and recommend cheap effective supplements to address them and other conditions all the frickin time.
My partner is currently taking completely unpatentable iron supplements for a deficiency and I am taking cheap, unpatentable psyllium husk for gut health and cholesterol management, both on the advice of our (Western, evidence-based) doctors.
This meme that ‘western’ doctors are only interested in peddling expensive pharmaceuticals and don’t look ‘holistically’ at patient health, or recommend cheap, effective treatments … it’s just not true at all.
Magnesium blood tests exist - https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/amp/article/magnesium-blood-...
Naturopathic ‘doctors’ have jobs because the credulous believe they’re something other than quacks. Naturopathy is a grab bag of unproven, alt-med bullshit and should be regarded as nothing more than charlatanry.
Your view of western medicine is nonsense driven by antipathy. Yes, there are problems with money from big Pharma corrupting the system. That doesn’t mean any of the woo-woo alt systems are any more real. They’re all far worse because they don’t even start with an evidence base.
The same could be said about your view of natural and traditional medicine.
> ‘Western’ doctors generally recommend things that work and are proven to work.
That's true of traditional medicine as well. The difference is how they are proven. Western medicines prove using a double blind study. It is expensive and you can't get funding for such studies unless an investor is assured of returns for their investment, which is only possible for novel, patentable medicines. And that means many natural medicines that work are ignored by the Western system. Traditional medicine on the other hand prove that something works not using double blind studies but 100s years of actual experience.
An example is magnesium. Doctors don't know that it works for muscle tightness and insomnia because no one has done a double blind study on it with thousands of patients. And nobody will because magnesium is not patentable. And so they prescribe Ambien CR, a very harmful and addictive drug. It is a very broken system, and you don't seem to want to acknowledge those limitations. (And no, no reliable tests exist for magnesium deficiency but that's a side point.)
> Naturopathy is a grab bag of unproven, alt-med bullshit and should be regarded as nothing more than charlatanry.
Yeah.. this attitude is the problem.
> They’re all far worse because they don’t even start with an evidence base.
They do, perhaps not in a way that satisfies you, but they do. The evidence is based on 100s of years of experience.
Edit: It's dumber and worse than I thought.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-health-...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/10/chinese-traditiona...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3326972/ho...
https://rhinos.org/tough-issues/promotion-of-traditional-chi...
It actually is like they're sending TCM doctors to Africa!
I had no idea...
No doubt ingredient sourcing is in the mix too.
I consider that quite evil as it’s not evidence based and undermines actually good, useful medicine. Just as I would/do consider anyone trying to increase take up of homeopathy in poorer parts of the world to be evil.
In the case of China and TCM there appear to be nationalist and financial motives.
Beyond that, some of the remedies are actively harmful, and we know that alt medicine practitioners have often kept people away from vital treatment.
“A isn’t perfect therefore I choose to believe in B.”
Where A is an evidence-based discipline with some shortcomings and B is unevidenced woo. I’d rather something that works and can be proven to work over a good narrative, myself.
Several of your criticisms there also only apply to the American way of running a health system, that’s a choice that’s not taken everywhere.
China is not only a strong player in biotech. Their capability in chemical R&D and market transfer is very strong, too both in small and industrial scale. And let’s not speak about electronics …
But there is evidence from all around the world that the Chinese government is actively pushing TCM, that they push it with the WHO, and that they are actively trying to open up markets for TCM “pharmaceuticals” and practice in African and other nations.
I put links in some of the sibling comments showing this.
But who knows, maybe if we keep the tariffs for another 10 years we can host the chemical manufacturing facilities that produce the drugs their biotechs sell to us after ours are no longer competitive.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
It's a daily challenge to keep track and not spiral into despair. It's not just that one man, it's that so many citizens love him. It truly boggles the mind.
The big question is how far until we bottom out, and what does "recovery" look like. The fact that the political divide has grown so that realities do not converge is rather terrifying.
The US might have had a president who was knowledgeable about technology and dedicated to solving climate change.
Who might have chosen differently about invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'm sure Gore would have made mistakes, but it's hard to see a path where he wasn't a better president (for the US and for the world) than W Bush.
I also blame the republicans for turning elections more and more into polarized shit slinging personalized attacks instead of policy based arguments, and I'd argue that this really took off in the Clinton era, and then got really bad under Obama/Trump.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/29/uselections200...
See: Trump
If Gore had fought harder and lost, Bush president and same.
The public wouldn't have believed / understood voting recount nuances: longer battle in courts = less faith in voting.
So it came down to weighing the corrosion of the voting process against goodness of Gore v Bush as president.
I don't think in 2000 anyone (including Gore) could have predicted that W's (and Cheney's) choices would be as poor as they were.
might have had? Ha, you should read up a bit on Jimmy Carter.
> A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.
That was him when he put solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Ronnie Ray-Gun removed and sent to a museum.
https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/trump-family-corruption...
The bar is so low, but god I cannot wait until we have another president that I don't think about more than a few times a year.
If we just didn't have a president at all for a term it would be an improvement.
It's like these people think they're watching WWE.
Can't imagine what it must be like on the inside, I am looking forward to that no longer being the case, one day.
So Yes, in effect, these people are literally watching WWE.
It's bad that Biden was silent. This enabled the mainstream media, which is captured by conservative oligarchs, to define Biden's presidency. There's going to be an onslaught of news either way, and it's already an uphill battle for anyone who isn't right wing to get a fair shake. So, you shouldn't let others make the news for you. Biden expanded overtime pay and oversaw a number of worker and consumer protections. It's bad that he wasn't tooting his own horn about this stuff!
Additionally, for America to ever return to being the shining example of democracy it claims to be, the next administration needs to very publicly make an example of the current administration. Americans, and the world, need to know that authoritarians have no place in America.
Biden removed troops from Foreign Wars, Donald Trump does the opposite and instead pretends he stopped 8 wars or something.
This is just poor memory. Us Americans are notorious for this, unfortunately.
no one remembers the constant mud slinging at obama?
There is no chance of that happening. Trump will pardon every single person in his administration and anyone else who carried water for him. The next President will say "we have to move on" and Trump himself will ride off into the sunset with the billions he made for himself and his family.
The problem is what he's doing.
Not needing to think about the president, or politics in general for that matter, has nothing to do with how much media coverage there is. The whole point of delegating professionals to handle making all the decisions is exactly so that you don't have to think about them yourself.
I fear you're interpreting what I'm saying the wrong way.
Imagine you have two children. As with any loving parent, doing what you can to support your children is paramount.
One of your children has substance abuse issues and has been struggling to keep a job and the other is running a few successful bookstores in a vacation town and recently got married.
Of course you don't have favorites. And of course you will do what you need to do to make each child successful.
But one of those children you're going to spend a lot more time thinking and worrying about than the other. But that does not mean you're not taking your job supporting either of them seriously.
I'm saying I'm getting real tired of thinking about which rehab center is best and googling the effects of barbiturates, if you know what I mean.
- why did the Trump administration decide to leave the WHO?
- what impact will this have?
- is this at all beneficial to other countries that aren't the US?
Why did Covid cause every government to become authoritarian on the directions of the WHO which couldn't even, itself, verify what stance to hold authority on.
Instead we have been sold to someone(s) that only want to see us divided internally and externally expanding our isolationist stances.
It just feels like everything is taking polarization to the extreme.
I feel really terrible imagining what my daughter will inherit from all of this.
What should he have done that he didn't do, in your opinion? Fwiw, it was the economic shock from COVID that caused this situation where he's come back to ruin our lives again. Any further disruption to the economy during COVID would have exacerbated that
I’ll just run down the record and stop at the first obvious error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._federal_government_respon...
> One month after [March 16, 2020, when the administration first recommended social distancing], epidemiologists Britta Jewell and Nicholas Jewell estimated that, had social distancing policies been implemented just two weeks earlier, U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 might have been reduced by 90%.
So there’s a concrete thing he could have done differently.
> Any further disruption to the economy during COVID would have exacerbated that
More stringent restrictions done earlier may have shortened the duration of the economic impact, who knows, we can’t exactly observe those alternate timelines directly.
The administration had zero discipline on messaging and so nothing was done with any consistency. As you say, he was initially positive that a vaccine would arrive quickly; when it was available, he flipped and endorsed alternative treatments of all kinds, many of them harmful. Formerly a champion of Dr. Fauci, then later his worst detractor and chief prosecutor in the court of public opinion.
Doesn’t line up with WHO’s record of events.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
No one appreciates the hard work when lives are saved. Let some people die and you can rile your base
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/world/biden-restores-who-...
So, like, what exactly is the point of making up reasons to hate Democrats. Obviously it's all the rage on the left (as on the right) to do so, but fabrications from the left are no better than fabrications from the right.
There is strong continuity on foreign policy between administrations.
You have to put this in context that Trump is also creating what appears to be an alternative venue to the UN with the "Board of Peace" which was originally a colonial authority to impose our will on Gaza, but its charter doesn't mention Gaza at all and talks about international conflict in general.
Again, I feel like you have to live in an alternate universe to think that there is much continuity on foreign policy between Trump and <insert Democrat here>. Or you have to be laser focused on one or two similarities and ignore the vast chasms of difference on everything else.
There are a number of places where there are superficial differences, and those differences are important to people of color, trans people, etc, but the Dems are always looking for reasons to make a right turn. They track the Republicans who actively move right and create a small space a relative distance from their position.
You realize we just kidnapped a head of state, we're currently repositioning strike forces around Iran, and we just caused NATO to reposition troops to Greenland to defend against imminent US invasion?
Can you please identify events that you see as "continuous" with these ones?
The Democrats are better at dressing things up and making it look like they're the good guys when they do the same stuff.
We are in a reorientation of American policy. Trump isn't doing this without consent from our elites, the same people that fund the Democrats who suspiciously aren't fighting it.
but said account was very like a shillbot, even if proper attribution is hard
What I am saying does not compute to you because you are tribalistic in your thinking. As the old quote goes: "The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."
I do not like this outcome but surely nobody is surprised? The specific act took a year to enact. They had to announce the intent to withdraw back in 24/25.
This is politics. The impact on worldwide health will take a while to emerge but the impact on soft power will be clear if and when other WHO members pick up the slack.