US Quits WHO Again -- This Time For Good!
During the COVID crisis, WHO was ineffective in even conducting international conversations, largely because its messaging so clearly reflected Chinese interests.
At last the President has ordered the US to leave the World Health Organization. Participating in this UN agency is one of the presumed obligations of enlightened governments. The implicit hope is that shaping the world’s health policies together more effective interventions will emerge.
Underneath these lofty aspirations, membership often seems to rely on simple aphorisms. A favorite is “diseases know no borders.” This and other sayings inevitably will be advanced by CDC employees “seconded” to the WHO, who will make the case that endless international conversations are somehow critical to the health of Americans back home. Just as likely they are thinking of how much better the cassoulet at their Geneva bistro is compared to anything on the menu back in Atlanta.
Leaving the WHO is long overdue and actually holds all the potential of making Americans more healthy again. From a pragmatic perspective, the “value” question must arise. Much like the President has come to ask regarding our NATO dues, what do we get for our money?
The US provides a vastly disproportionate share of WHO’s budget, nearly twenty percent, even though Americans count for barely four percent of the world’s population. The White House is particularly bothered by the disproportionate support required of China. With 17 percent of the world’s population, China provides less than 90 percent of the American contribution.
But these budget disparities are as nothing compared to China’s ability, at the hands of the WHO, to evade its responsibilities relating to protecting global health. It is now absolutely clear, after years of intentional efforts to mislead the world, that the COVID pandemic was instigated in Chinese laboratories in Wuhan. And, once propagating throughout the world, China purposely withheld information on the mutating virus that would have made containing it easier.
Smartly, the President has once again determined the WHO is a club to which the US does not want to belong. And, apart from the US being disproportionately taxed for its dues and WHO behaving like a Chinese vassal, there are historic reasons WHO is without value to the US.
The WHO has no ability to contribute to, let alone, lead an international effort to arrest a pandemic. During the COVID crisis, WHO was ineffective in even conducting international conversations, largely because its messaging so clearly reflected Chinese interests. Further, the WHO has no particular scientific capacity to identify a new pathogen or virus. Finally, and critically, WHO has no independent ability to collect and analyze data on the health status of the global population. Thus, it can never contemplate playing a role in really improving global health in any meaningful way.
Leaving the WHO can be a far less dramatic affair that might seem. We left UNESCO in 2017 largely because the organization had an undeniable anti-American bias, and refused to institute reforms to check financial mismanagement. A year later we left the UN Human Rights Council because it admitted countries whose human rights practices were abhorrent to the US.
I see our departure from WHO as part of a much larger story relating to how, going forward, the US will craft its role in world leadership. For a long stretch of the post-war period, countries appeared to assume similar traits while on the world stage. As part of the institutional framework constructed by the US after World War II, the WHO emerged as the forum for international cooperation regarding contagious diseases. The WHO, however, was always a US project. Nothing made the point more clearly than the decision by the US to eradicate smallpox from the globe. While often claimed as a triumph of WHO, the US was entirely responsible for developing the intervention and funding the entire campaign.
The election of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to head WHO in 2017 represents a moment when the US quietly gave up on having a more forceful hand in directing the work of the WHO. His leadership was resisted by several nations principally because of the scandal that engulfed the WHO during the Ebola epidemic in west Africa. Investigations revealed that officials in WHO’s Africa regional office and also in the Geneva headquarters had not wanted to upset the governments of the three member countries, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea by declaring an epidemic.
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And, at the time of his election, member countries had voiced concern that Tedros’s history suggested he consistently deferred to China’s leadership in public health.
It is now certain that as COVID emerged in the winter of 2019, Tedros worked to obscure the role China had played hosting, in its Wuhan laboratories, “gain of function” research designed to make the virus more lethal.
Given this history, and the aggressive rejection of American perspectives on how WHO might manage itself more effectively in the face of future pandemics, President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the WHO is well advised. It will fall to the US, in the post WHO period, to determine if any formal entity is any longer necessary as a locus for exchanging practical information needed in real time to prevent and control future epidemics. In a world of instant communication, the answer is likely “No.”