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April 17, 2020 03:24 pm

Why the World Health Organization Failed

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for The Atlantic: Donald Trump has declared that he would like the United States to stop funding the World Health Organization. It's unclear if he has the authority to change policy in this way, but he's trying. He wants to further break the WHO in ways it's already broken. Trump's ploy to defund the WHO is a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be disastrous too. Many nations, especially poor ones, currently depend on the WHO for medical help and supplies. But it is also true that in the run-up to this pandemic, the WHO failed the world in many ways. However, President Trump's move is precisely the kind of political bullying that contributed to the WHO's missteps. The WHO failed because it is not designed to be independent. Instead, it's subject to the whims of the nations that fund it and choose its leader. In July 2017, China moved aggressively to elect its current leadership. Instead of fixing any of the problems with the way the WHO operates, Trump seems to merely want the United States to be the bigger bully. Fixing the WHO is crucial, because we desperately need well-functioning global health institutions. But that requires a correct diagnosis of the problem. There is an alternate timeline in which the leadership of the WHO did its job fully and properly, warning the world in time so that effective policies could be deployed across the planet. Instead, the WHO decided to stick disturbingly close to China's official positions, including its transparent cover-ups. In place of a pandemic that is bringing global destruction, just maybe we could have had a few tragic local outbreaks that were contained. [...] Imagine the WHO took notice of the information it received from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Imagine the WHO also recognized that whistleblower doctors in Wuhan were being threatened with jail time. It would have realized that something important was happening, something worth investigating. It could have immediately, but politely, demanded access to the region around Wuhan and its hospitals. This alternate timeline does not ignore realpolitik. China is not a nation known for cooperating with international agencies when it doesn't want to. (This tendency is not specific to China. A U.S. law nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act" threatens to invade the International Criminal Court in The Hague should any U.S. service member be indicted.) If China refused access, as it likely would have, the expectation isn't that the WHO officials would just get up and yell "Freedom!" at China's leadership. But there was a path that would recognize the constraints of international diplomacy, but still put the health of billions above all else.

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