President Donald Trump is fed up with the World Health Organization, and it’s about time. On Tuesday, the White House announced a “halt” to U.S. funding of the WHO.
In a strongly-worded press conference from the Rose Garden, President Trump ripped the WHO’s response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
“The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion,” he said.
This echoes statements the President made last week, when he said, “And the World – WHO – World Health got it wrong. I mean, they got it very wrong. In many ways, they were wrong. They also minimized the threat very strongly and – not good.”
Did the WHO Drop the Ball?
From the beginning the WHO was either slow to respond or completely off the mark. For example:
November 2019:
- 17th: An unverified report suggests that the first case was in Hubei province.
December 2019:
- 1st: Doctors identify the first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus, in Wuhan, China.
- 26th: Health officials in Wuhan first reported an unusual cluster of pneumonia-like cases.
- 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission alerts the WHO.
January 2020:
- 30th: The WHO finally declares the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
February 2020:
- 20th: WHO inspectors went to Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus. They were only there for two days, spending most of their time in introductory meetings,
March 2020:
- 11th: The WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic.
President Trump was right when he said on April 7, “They called it wrong. They really – missed the call. could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known. And they probably did know.”
The WHO and China
The World Health Organization was founded in 1948 and is completely autonomous from any nation’s government.
However, The supposedly-neutral WHO has also been heavily criticized for being too deferential to China, and not just by the Trump Administration. Author Gordon Chang, who wrote “The Coming Collapse of China”, points out that, on January 14, the WHO made an infamous tweet:
“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan, China.”
Read that again… “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission…”. The problem with that statement is that Wuhan doctors were already aware of human-to-human contagion as early as mid-December.
But they took China’s word for it, and Chang calls that mistaken support the WHO’s “primary sin”. Because they believed a country that, not that long ago, tried to cover up the SARS outbreak, the WHO permitted COVID-19 to spread beyond China’s borders.
Professor Larry Gostin, who teaches global health law at Georgetown University, says, “Myself and other public health experts, based on what the World Health Organization and China were saying, reassured the public that this was not serious, that we could bring this under control.”
“We were given a false sense of assurance. We were deceived,” he says.
Objecting to the Travel Ban
On January 31, just one day after the WHO’s first announcement that COVID-19 was an international problem, President Trump implemented a ban on all foreign nationals who had traveled in China within the previous two weeks.
In the coming days, the White House extended those restrictions to include several other countries.
Almost immediately, the WHO second-guessed the President’s decision.
WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević said, “Although travel restrictions may intuitively seem like the right thing to do, this is not something that WHO usually recommends.”
Domestically, this gave Trump critics all the ammunition they needed. Democrats called the President “xenophobic” and “racist”. Top Democratic Party Presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders blasted those restrictions as a response to the coronavirus convictions.
Biden even famously tweeted “A wall will not stop the coronavirus. Banning all travel from Europe — or any other part of the world — will not stop it.”
In contrast to the WHO and Trump’s critics among the Democrats, leading experts in America support travel restrictions. This includes Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The efficacy of these restrictions is so undeniable that even Biden eventually changed his tune. His Deputy Campaign Manager, Kate Bedingfield told CNN:
“Joe Biden supports travel bans that are guided by medical experts, advocated by public health officials, and backed by a full strategy.”
“Science supported this ban, therefore he did, too,” she concluded.
Reviewing WHO and their Coronavirus Response
The United States’ funds approximately 15% of WHO’s budgets. That equated to $893 million over its two-year budget window. Subsequently, President Trump says new funding is on hold while a review of their coronavirus response is performed.
For comparison, China’s contributions equate to about 3% of the WHO’s budget.
President Trump is right. The World Health Organization needs to be held more accountable for their shortcomings and outright failures. And for the amount of money America invests, we deserve better results.
Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, has this to say about the WHO:
““I’m concerned about whether they can actually assume leadership effectively in terms of the international response,”