WHO gets global backing, leaving Trump in isolation

US President Donald Trump this week received a resounding global rebuke for suspending America’s funding for the World Health Organization amidst the COVID-19 crisis. He has accused the WHO, a vital part of the United Nations, for allegedly delaying its response to the virus outbreak in Wuhan and for being “biased” in favor of China, the US trade rival.

Health officials across the world condemned his move. As he chaired a virtual summit Thursday of the Group of Seven, the world’s richest countries except China, Trump’s peers brushed him off. They declared full support for the WHO and called for international cooperation in fighting the pandemic.

“The attempt to shift blame for his disastrous failure to protect his country, despite repeated warnings from the international body and others, could not be more hated or repugnant,” said the British daily Guardian in an editorial. It even quoted one critic calling Trump’s action as “a crime against humanity.” The US has the biggest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases so far among all the affected countries.

A fact check made by the New York Times after Trump announced the funding suspension affirmed that “on Jan. 22, two days after Chinese officials first publicized the serious threat posed by the virus ravaging Wuhan, the WHO chief held the first of what would be months of almost daily media briefings, sounding the alarm, telling the world to take the outbreak seriously.”

The NYT, however, noted that because WHO officials were initially divided on how to regard the outbreak, the body announced a global public health emergency only a week later. COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in mid-March. A review of WHO records shows that “while it made mistakes, the paper said, it has responded to COVID-19 “better than it has in previous diseases, and better than any national government.”

Checking the WHO website, I got these data: Member-nations and private foundations are the source of its financing. Its budget for 2018-2019 was $6.3 billion. The US had been the largest contributor: 14.67 percent of the budget ($553 million in 2018-2019). Britain’s share amounted to 7.77 percent, while the Gates Foundation paid for 9.76 percent. Dues by other member-nations represent only 1/4 of the US contribution. Dues are calculated relative to a nation’s wealth and population.

Although broadly influential, the WHO lacks meaningful enforcement authority. It can be subject to budgetary and political pressure by powerful states – like the US and China, and private funders like the Gates Foundation.

For instance, as one research intitute points out, about 70 percent of the US funding has gone to programs specified by the US Congress, such as for AIDS, mental health programs, cancer and heart disease prevention. While the “highest profile is on epidemic control and preparedness, it is actually the least important thing WHO has done historically,” says the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in the US.

As regards the blame-passing that led to Trump’s suspending US funding, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet, a leading medical journal that started way back in 1823, provides a deeper insight into the weaknesses in practically all responses to the COVID-19. In an opinion piece published in the Guardian on April 9, Richard Horton called the global response as “the greatest science policy failure in a generation.”

The signals were clear, Horton wrote, citing the series of viral epidemics: Henda in 1994, Nipah in 1998, SARS in 2003, MERS in 2012, and Ebola in 2014. “These major human epidemics were all caused by viruses that originated in animal hosts and crossed over into humans. COVID-19 is caused by a new variant of the same coronavirus that caused SARS,” he noted.

The warnings of doctors and scientists were ignored with fatal results,” Horton lamented, adding “We knew this was coming.” For proof, he cited the following:

• In her 1994 book, “The Coming Plague,” Laurie Garrett concluded: “While the human race battles itself, fighting over more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo Sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.”

• In 2004, the US Institute of Medicine evaluated the lessons of the 2003 SARS outbreak and concluded that its “rapid containment… SARS is a success in public health, but also a warning… if SARS reoccurs… health systems worldwide will be put under extreme pressure… Continual vigilance is vital.”

But the world ignored both warnings, Horton wrote. He noted how the former chief scientific adviser to the British government in 2012-2019, Ian Boyd, had pointed out his government’s failure to act on a “practice run for an influenza pandemic” in which about 200,000 people could die. “We learnt what would help,” he quoted Boyd as ruing, “but did not necessarily implement those lessons.” (UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who had belittled the COVID-19, himself has got seriously infected.)

What explains the British inaction? “Austerity [policy] blunted the ambition and commitment of the government to protect its people,” Horton wrote. “The political objective was to diminish the size and role of the state, he added. Ergo, when COVID-19 came surging, “we were poorly prepared,” he quoted Boyd.

“The first duty of government is to protect its citizens,” Horton wrote on. But governments made mistakes in responding to COVID-19, including China, which he said was “scarred” by its SARS experience and “overreacted” by imposing a lockdown on Wuhan City and the province of Hubei. Other affected countries mostly followed suit, in varying degrees of severity. This has resulted in grave social and economic dislocations all over, and as the IMF has warned this development might reverse its January estimate of 3 percent global output growth to a 3 percent shrinkage.

“COVID-19 has revealed the astounding fragility of our societies,” Horton observed. “It has exposed our inability to cooperate, to coordinate, and to act together… If COVID-19 eventually imbues human beings with some humility,” he concluded, “it’s possible that we will, after all, be receptive to the lessons of this lethal pandemic. Or perhaps we will sink back into our culture of complacent exceptionalism and await the next plague that will surely arrive. To go by recent history, that moment will come sooner than we think.”

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