
Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization - cyrksoft
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/coronavirus-updates.html
======
Darmody
The WHO is a joke.

What they did these last months should be the last nail in the coffin.

More like a health organization they act like a political one taking sides
with China and ignoring/censoring Taiwan even if they managed to control de
spread of the virus.[1][2]

And if that wasn't enough, they actively insisted that all the measures we're
taking now were pointless.

Why would anyone want a health organization that only cares about politics?

[1] [https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/28/taiwan-who-
coronavirus-...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/28/taiwan-who-coronavirus-
china-international-organizations/) [2]
[https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-who-
coronavir...](https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-who-coronavirus-
china/)

~~~
henearkr
Given the weight of US in UNO, why would they want to stop their funding,
instead of pushing for a reform of WHO?

Of course everybody benefits from the existence of an organ like WHO, the only
problems would be the number and quality of its experts network and labs. And
to reform that, that's in the opposite direction of stopping funds...

~~~
MR4D
At that level, you can most effectively get reform by cutting off funding.

Give it a week. Two at the most. You’ll see changes at the headline level.

~~~
henearkr
I doubt it, because the attack lacks seriousness when it's led by Trump.

It is right that WHO should have waited more verification of scientific data
before publishing easily misinterpreted too-short statements, on Twitter or
elsewhere. But look who is denouncing that.

------
fulafel
Interesting that the comments here aren't more critical of the decision.

Does the idea of improving the WHO by withholding money come from some kind of
shared "starving the beast" logic or is it just a revenge kind of reflex that
doesn't even have any positive expected outcome?

Eg the travel restrictions position[1], taken as an example in the article,
appears to have been be defensible and a mainstream position in the field. It
may turn out to be wrong or not in hindsight, like many things in this
pandemic, but it's no reason to try to harm the organisation.

[1] "Evidence shows that restricting the movement of people and goods during
public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations" in February,
[https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-
re...](https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-
recommendations-for-international-traffic-in-relation-to-covid-19-outbreak)

~~~
henearkr
Especially that the WHO is just a sum of its participating countries, so
removing its big US part will just make it weaker and that's it, nothing more.

Also, it they think the WHO was not good, the US should, as a huge contributor
(which means bringing a lot of US experts and administrators to the organ),
point to solutions to improve it. Deciding to cut the funds is completely
illogical.

------
wazokazi
Could this not have waited a few months? In the middle of an pandemic, to cut
off funding to the only organization that is coordinating the global response
is just crazy. The pettiness of this administration seems to know no bounds.
Even if we accept that WHO screwed up in their early response and yeah they
could be critical of China, cutting funding is wildly disproportionate
reaction.

China will offcourse make up the difference, and appropriately gain more
influence. As it rightly should.

~~~
conanbatt
The WHO arguably made the pandemic worse by discouraging the use of masks,
propagating information that turned out to be false and dangerous saying there
was no human-to-human interaction and generally sided with china in the
informational flow.

Easier to ignore the WHO if you don't give them any money.

~~~
sg47
Not as dangerous as calling it a democratic hoax or that it'll go down to zero
or like a miracle, it'll go away one day.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I don't think any people died from those things.

~~~
evgen
The body count from those statements will probably be in the mid-100k or so.
By instantly trying to politicise any criticism of his many failures Trump
incited his moron followers to ignore the situation in the critical early
weeks. States resisted shutdowns to score points with their cheetoh-fuhrer and
that will end up killing thousands.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Show me a death certificate with the cause of death saying "Trump failure".

------
gnusty_gnurc
This was long overdue.

> It is an open secret among international diplomats and public health experts
> that WHO is “not fit for mission” (as one of them put it to me), riddled
> with politics and bureaucracy. Given its previous failures and the warning
> that was Sars, its leadership has no excuse for reacting so oddly, and so
> tardily, to the current crisis.

[http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/who-must-
answer/](http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/who-must-answer/)

~~~
canada_dry
> This was long overdue.

Perhaps. However, Trump's using the WHO as scapegoat for his grievous
mishandling of the situation - starting in 2018 - is beyond unscrupulous.

~~~
bleah1000
What are you talking about? The US is at the top of the handling of the
crisis. You could definitely critique Trump and the fact he can't keep from
saying some of the most ridiculous and petty things, but even Gavin Newsom has
complimented the way this has been handled. If you only ever look at top
headlines, you'll believe the world is about to end and Trump is responsible.

Also, how is Trump responsible for Italy and Spain? Or are you so xenophobic
that you believe that only the US could possibly have handled this for them?
Italy and Spain listened to the WHO and they suffered and continue to suffer
because of it. Trump didn't completely listen to the WHO and saved lives. Now,
maybe he should have closed things down earlier and followed the Taiwan and
South Korea models, but those countries did well because they didn't listen to
the WHO and knew China was lying because of the last flu outbreak.

Do I think Trump is doing A+ work, no, but I can see that the US is doing much
better than many other countries. And when you say that Trump is doing a bad
job, you do realize that there are teams of people working on this. So you are
saying that everyone who's working on this crisis is mishandling everything?
If it's only Trump, what do you think he did wrong? You might say he
downplayed the pandemic, but everyone did. And if you think that, what should
he have said? It's easy to use hindsight and say people did these things
wrong. I think everyone is doing the best they can.

I'm really tired of seeing this criticism with no evidence and with other
countries that clearly did a worse job. I don't think it's fair to blame the
leaders of those other countries either, when it's pretty clear that China and
the WHO deserve a lot of the blame.

The WHO is not a scapegoat, they are directly responsible for thousands of
deaths, and untold suffering. They may have done it because of their close
ties to China, and they may have believed what they were saying, but at this
point would you trust anything they say?

------
bad_good_guy
Quite surprised to see how many comments here agree with the decision.

It is quite clear that the WHO have to placate the CCP in order to avoid China
withdrawing it's cooperation in its entirety. Yes, China has not been fully
transparent, but it has been a significant improvement from SARS in 2003.

It seems many people here have bought into the reactionary blame game and
failed to consider the diplomacy requirements of a group who need to cooperate
with as many countries as possible to be effective.

~~~
possibleworlds
Also, this move is 100% Trump deflecting attention from the narrative of his
own mis-management. He doesn't care about WHO, he probably didn't even know it
existed until a few weeks ago.

~~~
Melting_Harps

      Also, this move is 100% Trump deflecting attention from the narrative of his own mis-management. He doesn't care about WHO, he probably didn't even know it existed until a few weeks ago. 
    

Trump is an imbecile, and at best a useful idiot for Big Business, but that
doesn't take away that the WHO has lost all credibility given how they have
conducted themselves thus far. So, if nothing else I'm willing to say that he
has done well by de-funding the US' portion of the WHO. What its replaced with
is what the focus should really be, not Trump.

But, I'd go so far as to say that I hope this reduces the rest of the World's
reliance on China once and for all as we have seen the perils it has caused,
which incidentally has also been a narrative of his. Although that really
hasn't come to fruition despite all the trade war rhetoric, so I'd say he has
failed and not gone far enough.

~~~
bathtub365
It doesn’t seem like the best time to try to totally dismantle it.

~~~
Melting_Harps
Why not, we risk going back to the centralized pitfall once again if we don't
right now; it won't be easy, but its very clear that the entire World is/will
be falling into a deep recession, if not depression. I'd say if local
manufacturing was ramped up then at least you could spur on local employment
numbers.

Retraining people in this time is perhaps the most opportune as well as as
they're confined at Home.

Also, I don't know how close you've been following the manufacturing of
respirators or medical PPE in the US, but its like people finally realized 3d
printers can be used for more than pointless affections and have been
repurposed to be used for medical supplies equipment and tools and have
brought out the best in what the 'maker space' could be under the guidance of
actual Medical professionals.

There are guys on imgur who are reaching out to front liners to provide them
with the equipment they can't get elsewhere at no cost.

Its a do or die situation for those so heavily reliant on them for medical
supplies, quite literately, as untold deaths will go unaccounted for because
China sent low quality or totally faulty equipment if it was even available to
begin with. It will be brushed under the unavoidable cost of a pandemic--that
has been made worse because the CCP censored, and disappeared anyone who
sought to speak out on the severity of COVID19.

Which should have grave consequences internationally.

------
ericb
Weren't the only working tests originally from WHO? If the US had used them,
wouldn't we have had functional testing much sooner?

~~~
henearkr
From Wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing)):

"The World Health Organization adopted the German recipe for manufacturing
kits sent to low-income countries without the resources to develop their own.
The German recipe was published on 17 January 2020; the protocol developed by
the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was not available until 28
January, delaying available tests in the U.S."

So, a German lab found the test, and WHO helped manufacturing it in low-income
countries.

But, as I said in another comment (only to be downvoted), the WHO is a sum of
its participating countries. So everything the WHO finds is actually from some
country's lab. That's just how WHO is made.

------
sn41
I wish this kind of hard bargaining is postponed till the present crisis is
over. A lot of poor people in the world are eager to get back to their normal
lives and livelihoods. WHO has been proactive, even though late, in co-
ordinating with governments to get serious with their actions.

~~~
abjKT26nO8
_> WHO has been proactive, even though late,_

According to Merriam-Webster[1]:

 _«proactive» · acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes_

[1]: [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/proactive](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/proactive)

------
_bxg1
Lots of commenters have pointed out a pattern of increasing failures and
shortcoming by the WHO, which I wasn't aware of, but I still have to think:
don't we need a centralized touchstone for these kinds of crises? Even if the
WHO needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, isn't a dysfunctional one better than
nothing at all?

~~~
cjbprime
It's only "better than nothing at all" if you assume that any action it could
take is better than doing nothing. That doesn't seem to have been true
recently to me. Was
[https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19](https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19)
better than nothing?

~~~
henearkr
WHO advised the world to perform as many tests as possible. And that was an
excellent advice, only it was ignored and not taken seriously. That's an
example where the WHO is not the problem but its enforcement capability (just
the same problem with UN decisions on war zones, which can never be enforced).

To solve that, a reform is needed. But absolutely not by cutting its funds,
which is silly.

~~~
cjbprime
Thanks, I hadn't known about that. It looks like this advice about tests was
given on March 16? My city had already shut down by then due to outbreak.

~~~
henearkr
Yes, unfortunately, as all UN parts, the WHO is a consensus organ, at the
barycenter of individual countries' participating scientists... meanwhile, in
countries or cities better connected with their experts, or just with better
experts, the reaction is better and faster.

The exact quote was: "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test,
test."

------
tibbydudeza
It was clear from the actions of the Chinese govt the seriousness of the
situation regardless of what they said.

Mass quarantines for millions in a few cities and rapid shipment of medical
equipment, personnel and the building of treatment facilities for the
province.

You need to be a pretty piss poor govt to only base your preperations on WHO
press releases or worse yet Chinese media reports.

Trump is just looking for a scapegoat as usual.

------
blackrock
A lot of criticism here about the WHO. But what is the legal obligation of the
United States to listen to anything the WHO says?

So what?

The virus is called COVID-19 for a reason. The virus was discovered in 2019.
Each country can do their own thing.

Trump shut down international travel from China. He should have shut down
travel from everywhere.

Once that virus was out of the bag, then it became impossible to stop. How do
you stop something at the beginning, that you don’t even know exists? You can
only try to slow it down. To isolate the infected. And to contain it.

But once an infected person leaves the border, then the virus will replicate
in the next country. You only need one person to reach exponential growth.

The WHO even stated that they think the virus was building steam in all
countries all over the world, and they were correct.

Here, it seems the politicians don’t understand biological science, and they
don’t listen to their experts, and that they don’t understand what exponential
growth is.

Further, the CDC refused to advise Americans to wear a mask, even a cloth mask
to help reduce the transmission velocity of droplets. This was a bone-headed
decision, that was entirely in the realms of control of the United States.

And then, the media keeps bringing up how China silenced an eye doctor, but
what would this have done? Stop the virus? Doubtful, it was already building
up steam in China. Make people more cautious, and wear a mask? Maybe, but
local Chinese news TV were already advising that people be careful and
vigilant, and wear a mask when outside. But not everyone was following that
advice.

In contrast, what happened in New York, when rumors got out that the governor
was shutting down the state? The result was that people fled to distant
states! Some went to Rhode Island, and others went to Florida. Remember, all
you need is one infected person to mess it up for everyone.

But really, I think what impacted the United States the most, was when Trump
announced the travel ban from Europe. Everyone flocked home, and there were no
health checks. The virus was already building up slowly, but this was the
catalyst that accelerated it.

------
henearkr
It would be nice to have an AMA with a WHO personality. I don't know if any of
them is reading HN.

------
veeralpatel979
non paywalled link:

[http://archive.is/mhfp8](http://archive.is/mhfp8)

