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Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

122 points by cyrksoft 7y ago

wazokazi 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - gowld 7y ago
    As bad as WHO may be, the US Federal government was and is far worse on all the same points. Swapping in Trump and Kushner for WHO is not an improvement.
    - 0xy 7y ago
      As far as I was aware the US government issued a travel ban on China while the WHO was still wrongly claiming travel bans are ineffective. Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china-coronavirus-is-officially-an-international-emergency/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china... "Tedros, as he is called, said the WHO does not recommend limiting either trade or travel to China at this time. “In fact, we oppose it,” he said. The health organization said it would question border closures, quarantining of airplane passengers who aren’t ill, and similar steps." This organization is either totally incompetent or complicit with spreading CCP propaganda. In fact, they reacted significantly slower than the US government.
      - throwaway48472 7y ago
        Italy was one of the first countries to issue a travel ban on Chinese travelers. South Korea never issued a travel ban. In order for a travel ban to be effective, it has to be for all incoming travelers. Not just for a specific country.
        aeternum 7y ago
        >In order for a travel ban to be effective, it has to be for all incoming travelers. Not just for a specific country. This is not true. A ban on a specific country cannot eliminate the risk but it can still slow the spread just like any mitigation.
        nikofeyn 6y ago
        there are plenty of ways to slow the spread that doesn't unnecessarily break up families, keep people away from their jobs, create job loss, keep people stranded, and harbor poor goodwill towards another country. the travel ban has uprooted lives, and now here we are, and the u.s. government is still phoning this in. the travel ban against china was a pointless exercise in political posturing and akin to a clam's defense strategy. it isn't a big surprise that the virus still got here, primarily from europe, and we weren't even aware of it because the u.s. wasn't testing nor were they tracking, the two things that have time and time again shown to be extremely effective. there are plenty of models that quarantining the source only does not work. china even proved this. the initial quarantine of wuhan only was not working, so they had to expand it to everywhere. south korea showed testing and tracking worked better than shutting down travel. the u.s. travel ban against china was ineffective. however, it will now continue indefinitely because the u.s. is in the middle of a shit show, and this will continue to harm people and businesses affected by the travel ban. it will add months if not years of delays to visa processing everywhere.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - llamataboot 7y ago
        Travel bans are not effective unless they can be strict and from everywhere. Like, if you are a small island country that can keep everyone out or do strict quarantine, sure. But the travel ban on China was just theatrics and "microbial theatre" as is evidenced by, uh, reality.
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      I'd be on board defunding the fed gov as well!
  - sg47 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      I don't think any people died from those things.
      - evgen 6y ago
        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 6y ago
        Show me a death certificate with the cause of death saying "Trump failure".
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - parineum 6y ago
      Unfortunately we don't live in a world of one or the other. Both things happened and both were bad. Either thing not happening (along with countless others) would have been best.
  - ksk 7y ago
    If masks are so amazing, how come we don't see Fauci or any of the other experts regularly wearing masks?
    - henearkr 6y ago
      In some other countries they do, especially in Europe.
      - ksk 6y ago
        I'm a little suspicious when the real experts don't wear masks, and the internet experts berate you over the head for not wearing one.
        henearkr 6y ago
        Maybe that's because in front of the media some experts consider to uncover their face as a worthwhile risk, in order to reach to people understanding more easily. That's not all experts, though, many of them still wear their mask in front of the camera.
- 0xy 7y ago
  Why do you think that the WHO bears no responsibility for spreading misinformation? Often times they simply repeat CCP propaganda verbatim, arguably worsening the crisis. Then there's the flagrant lies about masks, calling travel bans ineffective then scrambling to change tone, delaying declarations of status, etc etc. https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152 https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152 The WHO also isn't really doing anything on the ground (besides finger waving countries into giving them billions of dollars). Their legacy is delay, confusion, misinformation, outright lies and incompetence.
  - ksk 7y ago
    >The WHO also isn't really doing anything on the ground I'm curious, how are you so certain about this?
  - simonh 6y ago
    The WHO team was instrumental in getting the Chinese to report accurate infection rates, within 2 days of them arriving in country the reporting system was completely overhauled and they started reporting clinically diagnosed cases as well as positive tests at a time when testing capacity was minimal. This was a crucial contribution in illuminating the scale of the outbreak early on. Before that they, like everyone else, was almost entirely dependent on information from the Chinese government. The WHO had developed a test kit, was distributing it and was helping countries ramp up production at a time when the US was making a complete mess of testing. Many third world countries are heavily dependent on WHO expertise and support. This move is a knife in their backs. Honestly, who has the best track record of tackling this issue and taking it seriously. The WHO, or a man who was calling it a hoax 6 weeks after the WHO had alerted of possible international transmission?
    - trobertson 6y ago
      > Honestly, who has the best track record of tackling this issue and taking it seriously. Taiwan, who the WHO regularly denies exists. South Korea, whose success and strategies have been ignored. This crisis has shown us the true face of the WHO: a primarily political organization with occasional work in medicine.
- rasengan 7y ago
  WHO is funded by Bill Gates [1]. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful-doctor/ https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful...
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    Gates' father was a pal of Soros and Fauci. https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1248480455826870282 https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1248480455826870282
    - umpc 7y ago
      How dare they practice philanthropy! /s
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        Their crime was to be rewarded for their philanthropy at a ceremony where Fauci was a presenter. That makes the three of them "pals" in a nefarious cabal.
      - Fjolsvith 7y ago
        Gates also was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein: https://exposingvaccinegenocide.org/bill-gates-pedophile-scandal/ https://exposingvaccinegenocide.org/bill-gates-pedophile-sca... I wonder what else they practiced.
        _tik_ 7y ago
        China's Xi also writes thank you letter to Bill Gates.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > I wonder what else they practiced. Apparently, promoting vaccines according to your source. How villainous!
    - BoiledCabbage 7y ago
- nikofeyn 6y ago
  it is coming from an administration that lies with nearly every word, and they aren't even constructed lies. they are lies equivalent to what you make up on the spot when you forget your proverbial homework. it really isn't surprising. this administration commits treason on a daily basis, as they repeatedly throw the entire country under the bus for their own gain. it is truly sickening.
  - IfIEverCatchYou 6y ago
    If you haven't already, would you mind reading about HN's approach to comments and site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - nikofeyn 6y ago
      there is no deep untruth in what i said, and i said it civilly. you should read the guidelines because i find your newly created username to be disturbing.
  - henearkr 6y ago
    It is also throwing the entire planet under the bus... Denial of the global warming emergency should be accountable before the justice -- and probably even the International Criminal Court, if only they had ratified the Rome Statute -- in the near future.
sn41 7y ago
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.
- craftinator 7y ago
  Self-contradictory.
- abjKT26nO8 6y ago
  > 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
Darmody 7y ago
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-china-international-organizations/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/28/taiwan-who-coronavirus-... [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-who-coronavirus-china/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/taiwan-who-coronavir...
- draw_down 7y ago
  I lack a lot of context here, but I recently saw a tweet of theirs from January. It was jarring to see how much they uncritically went along with China’s narrative about the virus. I understand a lot about the situation is unprecedented and especially in early weeks there was a lot of confusion and a lot of unknowns. But hopefully this at least will spur them to act more cautiously in regard to info from China.
  - 0xy 7y ago
    I don't think their behavior is redeemable, given they continue to lie. After all, the WHO Director-General claimed within the last week without a shred of evidence that he was subject to racist and derogatory attacks from Taiwan's leaders. This is after WHO threw Taiwan under the bus and denied them access to critical health information on the express orders from China. The entire organization is corrupt. Blindly repeating CCP propaganda and punishing China's enemies is not the sign of a healthy organization. Their recommendations were, at times, completely false.
    - henearkr 7y ago
      By "their recommandations", you are alluding to when they said that travel bans on China where ineffective (that's true, only complete border closure is effective), and to when they said there was no proof of human-human transmission (that was true when they said it, nobody knew yet, except some Chinese scientists prevented from speaking by their government). I see a lot of these deformed affirmations...
gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    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?
_bxg1 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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."
ericb 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- fanatic2pope 7y ago
  This whole thing is a distraction to try to minimize and deflect blowback from the US's own ineptitude.
veeralpatel979 7y ago
non paywalled link: http://archive.is/mhfp8 http://archive.is/mhfp8
fulafel 6y ago
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-recommendations-for-international-traffic-in-relation-to-covid-19-outbreak https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
- henearkr 6y ago
  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.
henearkr 6y ago
It would be nice to have an AMA with a WHO personality. I don't know if any of them is reading HN.
bad_good_guy 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      It doesn’t seem like the best time to try to totally dismantle it.
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
blackrock 6y ago
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.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
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.

122 points by cyrksoft 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- gowld 7y ago
  As bad as WHO may be, the US Federal government was and is far worse on all the same points. Swapping in Trump and Kushner for WHO is not an improvement.
  - 0xy 7y ago
    As far as I was aware the US government issued a travel ban on China while the WHO was still wrongly claiming travel bans are ineffective. Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china-coronavirus-is-officially-an-international-emergency/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china... "Tedros, as he is called, said the WHO does not recommend limiting either trade or travel to China at this time. “In fact, we oppose it,” he said. The health organization said it would question border closures, quarantining of airplane passengers who aren’t ill, and similar steps." This organization is either totally incompetent or complicit with spreading CCP propaganda. In fact, they reacted significantly slower than the US government.
    - throwaway48472 7y ago
      Italy was one of the first countries to issue a travel ban on Chinese travelers. South Korea never issued a travel ban. In order for a travel ban to be effective, it has to be for all incoming travelers. Not just for a specific country.
      - aeternum 7y ago
        >In order for a travel ban to be effective, it has to be for all incoming travelers. Not just for a specific country. This is not true. A ban on a specific country cannot eliminate the risk but it can still slow the spread just like any mitigation.
        nikofeyn 6y ago
        there are plenty of ways to slow the spread that doesn't unnecessarily break up families, keep people away from their jobs, create job loss, keep people stranded, and harbor poor goodwill towards another country. the travel ban has uprooted lives, and now here we are, and the u.s. government is still phoning this in. the travel ban against china was a pointless exercise in political posturing and akin to a clam's defense strategy. it isn't a big surprise that the virus still got here, primarily from europe, and we weren't even aware of it because the u.s. wasn't testing nor were they tracking, the two things that have time and time again shown to be extremely effective. there are plenty of models that quarantining the source only does not work. china even proved this. the initial quarantine of wuhan only was not working, so they had to expand it to everywhere. south korea showed testing and tracking worked better than shutting down travel. the u.s. travel ban against china was ineffective. however, it will now continue indefinitely because the u.s. is in the middle of a shit show, and this will continue to harm people and businesses affected by the travel ban. it will add months if not years of delays to visa processing everywhere.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - llamataboot 7y ago
      Travel bans are not effective unless they can be strict and from everywhere. Like, if you are a small island country that can keep everyone out or do strict quarantine, sure. But the travel ban on China was just theatrics and "microbial theatre" as is evidenced by, uh, reality.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    I'd be on board defunding the fed gov as well!
- sg47 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    I don't think any people died from those things.
    - evgen 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        Show me a death certificate with the cause of death saying "Trump failure".
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - parineum 6y ago
    Unfortunately we don't live in a world of one or the other. Both things happened and both were bad. Either thing not happening (along with countless others) would have been best.
- ksk 7y ago
  If masks are so amazing, how come we don't see Fauci or any of the other experts regularly wearing masks?
  - henearkr 6y ago
    In some other countries they do, especially in Europe.
    - ksk 6y ago
      I'm a little suspicious when the real experts don't wear masks, and the internet experts berate you over the head for not wearing one.
      - henearkr 6y ago
        Maybe that's because in front of the media some experts consider to uncover their face as a worthwhile risk, in order to reach to people understanding more easily. That's not all experts, though, many of them still wear their mask in front of the camera.
0xy 7y ago
Why do you think that the WHO bears no responsibility for spreading misinformation? Often times they simply repeat CCP propaganda verbatim, arguably worsening the crisis. Then there's the flagrant lies about masks, calling travel bans ineffective then scrambling to change tone, delaying declarations of status, etc etc. https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152 https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152 The WHO also isn't really doing anything on the ground (besides finger waving countries into giving them billions of dollars). Their legacy is delay, confusion, misinformation, outright lies and incompetence.
- ksk 7y ago
  >The WHO also isn't really doing anything on the ground I'm curious, how are you so certain about this?
- simonh 6y ago
  The WHO team was instrumental in getting the Chinese to report accurate infection rates, within 2 days of them arriving in country the reporting system was completely overhauled and they started reporting clinically diagnosed cases as well as positive tests at a time when testing capacity was minimal. This was a crucial contribution in illuminating the scale of the outbreak early on. Before that they, like everyone else, was almost entirely dependent on information from the Chinese government. The WHO had developed a test kit, was distributing it and was helping countries ramp up production at a time when the US was making a complete mess of testing. Many third world countries are heavily dependent on WHO expertise and support. This move is a knife in their backs. Honestly, who has the best track record of tackling this issue and taking it seriously. The WHO, or a man who was calling it a hoax 6 weeks after the WHO had alerted of possible international transmission?
  - trobertson 6y ago
    > Honestly, who has the best track record of tackling this issue and taking it seriously. Taiwan, who the WHO regularly denies exists. South Korea, whose success and strategies have been ignored. This crisis has shown us the true face of the WHO: a primarily political organization with occasional work in medicine.
rasengan 7y ago
WHO is funded by Bill Gates [1]. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful-doctor/ https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful...
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Gates' father was a pal of Soros and Fauci. https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1248480455826870282 https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1248480455826870282
  - umpc 7y ago
    How dare they practice philanthropy! /s
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      Their crime was to be rewarded for their philanthropy at a ceremony where Fauci was a presenter. That makes the three of them "pals" in a nefarious cabal.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      Gates also was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein: https://exposingvaccinegenocide.org/bill-gates-pedophile-scandal/ https://exposingvaccinegenocide.org/bill-gates-pedophile-sca... I wonder what else they practiced.
      - _tik_ 7y ago
        China's Xi also writes thank you letter to Bill Gates.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > I wonder what else they practiced. Apparently, promoting vaccines according to your source. How villainous!
  - BoiledCabbage 7y ago
nikofeyn 6y ago
it is coming from an administration that lies with nearly every word, and they aren't even constructed lies. they are lies equivalent to what you make up on the spot when you forget your proverbial homework. it really isn't surprising. this administration commits treason on a daily basis, as they repeatedly throw the entire country under the bus for their own gain. it is truly sickening.
- IfIEverCatchYou 6y ago
  If you haven't already, would you mind reading about HN's approach to comments and site guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - nikofeyn 6y ago
    there is no deep untruth in what i said, and i said it civilly. you should read the guidelines because i find your newly created username to be disturbing.
- henearkr 6y ago
  It is also throwing the entire planet under the bus... Denial of the global warming emergency should be accountable before the justice -- and probably even the International Criminal Court, if only they had ratified the Rome Statute -- in the near future.

sn41 7y ago

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.

craftinator 7y ago
Self-contradictory.
abjKT26nO8 6y ago
> 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

Darmody 7y ago

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

draw_down 7y ago
I lack a lot of context here, but I recently saw a tweet of theirs from January. It was jarring to see how much they uncritically went along with China’s narrative about the virus. I understand a lot about the situation is unprecedented and especially in early weeks there was a lot of confusion and a lot of unknowns. But hopefully this at least will spur them to act more cautiously in regard to info from China.
- 0xy 7y ago
  I don't think their behavior is redeemable, given they continue to lie. After all, the WHO Director-General claimed within the last week without a shred of evidence that he was subject to racist and derogatory attacks from Taiwan's leaders. This is after WHO threw Taiwan under the bus and denied them access to critical health information on the express orders from China. The entire organization is corrupt. Blindly repeating CCP propaganda and punishing China's enemies is not the sign of a healthy organization. Their recommendations were, at times, completely false.
  - henearkr 7y ago
    By "their recommandations", you are alluding to when they said that travel bans on China where ineffective (that's true, only complete border closure is effective), and to when they said there was no proof of human-human transmission (that was true when they said it, nobody knew yet, except some Chinese scientists prevented from speaking by their government). I see a lot of these deformed affirmations...

gnusty_gnurc 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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 6y ago
  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?

_bxg1 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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."

ericb 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
fanatic2pope 7y ago
This whole thing is a distraction to try to minimize and deflect blowback from the US's own ineptitude.

veeralpatel979 7y ago

non paywalled link: http://archive.is/mhfp8 http://archive.is/mhfp8

fulafel 6y ago

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-recommendations-for-international-traffic-in-relation-to-covid-19-outbreak https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...

henearkr 6y ago
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.

henearkr 6y ago

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

bad_good_guy 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    It doesn’t seem like the best time to try to totally dismantle it.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago

blackrock 6y ago

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.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

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.