Unless we close all our borders permanently, pandemics will spread unless they’re addressed on a global basis.
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The WHO had spearheaded smallpox eradication efforts in the past, which had “failed spectacularly,” Jason Schwartz, a historian of medicine at the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post . Yet Henderson did not demure.
“Smallpox eradication proved to be infinitely more difficult than I or anyone else had imagined it would be,” Henderson explained in a 2013 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Q&A . There were floods, wars, famines, and refugees, as well as the challenges of national bureaucracies and “a sclerotic WHO administration,” …
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You realize he’s talking about over 50 years ago, right?
That was when WHO allegedly eradicated smallpox. So that’s the time frame you are talking about too, whether or not you know it.
WHO was a figurehead organization. At best a funding clearinghouse. At worst, it got in the way.
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WHO is a political regime. They have failed especially in this crisis.
Now cue but but trump. We know orange man bad
Why has the WHO failed?
There is a simple reason for this. For all the responsibility vested in the WHO, it has little power. Unlike international bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the WHO, which is a specialised body of the UN, has no ability to bind or sanction its members. Its annual operating budget, about $2bn in 2019, is smaller than that of many university hospitals, and split among a dizzying array of public health and research projects. The WHO is less like a military general or elected leader with a strong mandate, and more like an underpaid sports coach wary of “losing the dressing room”, who can only get their way by charming, grovelling, cajoling and occasionally pleading with the players to do as they say.
The WHO “has been drained of power and resources”, said Richard Horton, editor of the influential medical journal the Lancet. “Its coordinating authority and capacity are weak. Its ability to direct an international response to a life-threatening epidemic is non-existent.”
At the same time, the international order on which the WHO relies is fraying, as aggressive nationalism becomes normalised around the world. “All the previous rules about global norms, public health and understanding of what’s expected in terms of an outbreak has crumbled,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “None of us know where this is leading.”
They will anyway, obviously.
He was an American.
Yes, he was. And WHO didn’t do what he did. He did what he did, and by his reckoning, he did it in spite of WHO.
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I say we don’t stop funding it, we fund it according to the level of support we get in this country.
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Smallpox?
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yes. next stop the UN
We will replace the who with Jared kushner
it wont need replacing
How about the CDC instead.
We give WHO $58M (down $122M, thanks Trump). China is next with $25M.
I say we cut ours to what China’s is and use the other half to buy ventilators and masks.
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It’s “trickle down” antibiotics.
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Can we bill them?
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After this ■■■■ show yes we should cut funding to the WHO.
If they want to cover for the CCP then the CCP can pay their expenses.
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no thanks
“preliminary research from China suggests that the most common type of COVID-19 test, known as a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, may give false-negative results about 30% of the time.”
