Was Trump Right to Defund the World Health Organization?
And the Future of International Institutions
On April 14, Trump announced that he would “halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus.”
Is this a good idea or not? My short answer is no, it isn’t, but I do understand the motives behind the idea, and those I do agree with.
So while I condemn Trump for taking this action, I actually have a proposal for a more extreme action that I hope Trump takes in the future.
More on that later though as first I will justify my agreement with Trump’s motives:
Put simply, the Chinese government covered up information and spread misinformation about the Coronavirus for weeks, causing the global pandemic…
This study concludes that “If NPIs (Nonpharmisudical Interventions) could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in China, cases could have been reduced by 66%, 86%, and 95%, respectively, together with significantly reducing the number of affected areas.”
…And the WHO bought into that misinformation, repeated it, and has yet to back down from their pro-China position.
At the Munich Security Conference the WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in his speech “Much has been written and said about my praise for China. I have given credit where it’s due, and I will continue to do that, as I would and I did for any country that fights an outbreak aggressively at its source to protect its own people and the people of the world, even at great cost to itself.”
And more recently, the WHO has expressed support for China reopening its wet markets, believed to be the source of Covid-19, but at least the confirmed source of SARS, saying “wet markets and other food markets do not need to be closed down.”
“More than 60 congressional lawmakers urged the World Health Organization on Thursday (April 9) to ban and permanently close all wet markets globally amid the coronavirus pandemic,” but they did just the opposite.
So I understand why Trump is starting an investigation into the WHO; their pattern of behavior as of late seems to indicate they’re in some manner under Chinese control and that is limiting their ability to perform their sole duty, to protect world health.
Just look at this video of Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist and WHO official, responding to, or, avoiding, to be more precise, questions about Taiwan; something isn’t right.
Taiwan was ignored when it first learned of human-to-human transmission and notified the UN about it. Two weeks later, the WHO sent out this infamous tweet saying that “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
Since then, Taiwan has had only 395 cases and 6 deaths; probably because, according to this Bloomberg Opinion piece, it ignored the WHO right back: “When the WHO recommended against restrictions on travelers from China, officials in Taiwan implemented bans from the original affected areas and later widened them. As the WHO advised that masks weren’t necessary, Taiwan ramped up production and issued them to citizens.”
And now, Taiwan is still being sidelined, just because China doesn’t like them.
So an investigation into the WHO? Good. There’s reasonable cause for it and what we learn could save lives in the future. But defunding it? Bad. Here’s why:
It could only make things worse.
The virus has long since gone global; 2 million people have it and 134 thousand people have died. The damage has been done. The only thing the WHO/China can do now is help, even if they have bad motives. Defunding will just harm the less well-off nations who do rely on the WHO’s assistance.
Those are my thoughts on this situation, but as I mentioned earlier, I have some more thoughts on what should happen after we beat this thing.
What are we, the freest country in the world, doing associating with authoritarian nations that use deadly diseases to their advantage?
In clearer terms, why is China, and all the countries like it, in the UN?
They have proven time and time again that their only goal is power and that they will stop at nothing to get it. So why are we giving it to them?
North Korea is in the UN instead of Taiwan for goodness sake!
The US should either form an agreement with the other democratic member states to kick the nondemocratic ones out, or it should pull out itself and start its own international institution: The Free People of Earth.
We should, of course, continue treating and negotiating with these authoritarian nations separately as that’s necessary to keep world peace; but I don’t think we can keep saying we support freedom throughout the world when we allow China to sit on the Human Rights Council and China and Russia to have the same voting power on the Security Council as the UK, France, and us.
We need to create incentives for nations to become more free and democratic, and consequences when the authoritarian nations act authoritarian; at the moment, they’re the ones benefiting most.
More on similar topics:
…we’re already seeing the consequences. Russia and China, the two biggest threats to the US, have seen this divide and are exploiting it…
…a commitment from all industrialized nations to cut their own emissions and then work together to help developing countries expand their green energy sectors. No other approach will be enough…
…according to this theory, the US is reluctant to work under international institutions both because its values aren’t in alignment with them and…
