Defunding the WHO was a calculated decision, not an impromptu tweet
It wouldn’t make much sense to sack the fire service during a forest fire, yet that’s effectively what US President Donald Trump has done by suspending funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of a pandemic. The WHO is by no means perfect, but undermining the world’s only global public health agency does not serve US interests.
The US is the biggest contributor to the 194-member WHO, providing around US$400 million (£322 million) annually, which makes up about a fifth of the budget. The organisation has been asked to do more with less for decades and is already in a fairly perilous financial situation.
Although the move is characteristically shortsighted, this time Trump’s decision was premeditated. On April 10, he hinted that US funding would be withdrawn, adding: “We’re looking at it very, very closely … we’ll have a lot to say about it.”
The following week he confirmed the suspension of funding and blamed the WHO for “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus”. He argued that the organisation had been too slow to investigate the outbreak and had been complicit in China’s suppression and misreporting of cases.
Was he correct? Well, there is evidence that local officials attempted to cover up the early outbreak, and the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has stood by his endorsement of China’s heavy-handed tactics. As with decisions to honour Turkey’s president, Recep Erdogan, and former Zimbabwean ruler Robert Mugabe, Tedros’ stance has been roundly criticised. In his defence, it does seem to stem from a genuine desire to win engagement in order to deliver his mandate of achieving health for all.
Interestingly, President Trump was one of the few world leaders who seemed to agree that China was doing a good job, praising the government’s “hard work and transparency” in January and commending Xi Jinping’s handling of the mounting pandemic in a string of further comments during February.
https://news.yahoo.com/defunding-calculated-decision-not-impromptu-140507799.html
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