LEAVING THE WHO

COVID 19, Healthcare, Healthcare Politics, Politics, Trump, Trump Politics

LEAVING THE WHO. THE SAME MISTAKES AGAIN

So, Mr. Trump has announced that we are pulling out of the WHO. He claims that, in his opinion, the WHO did not do enough to alert the US on the problems associated with COVID-19; they didn’t do it early enough, and they relied too much on China for their data.

His huffy response is to eliminate their funding and withdraw from the organization. Why? and what are the consequences for the USA? Are we making the same mistakes that we made in January and February once again?

WHY?
There seem so be several reasons for this move.

    1. Distract and deflect.
      Korea and the US each had their first death from COVID-19 within 24 hours of each other.
      As of today, S. Korea has had a total of 269 deaths, at a rate of 5 deaths per million citizens.
      As of today, the US has had a total of 104,910 deaths, at a rate of 317 deaths per million. 63 times greater. We screwed up. Big time.
    2. The WHO is very much involved in Climate Change monitoring and data collection, and we don’t want any of it, it goes against this Administration’s policy agenda.
    3. We are attempting to pull out of every international agreement that we can including the WTO, the World Court, the TPP, the Iran deal, Arms limitation deals with Russia, and trade agreements with anyone at all who has a positive trade balance with us.

WHAT ARE WE LOSING IF WE LEAVE THE WHO?

    1. Health and Climate Change Country Profiles/Health and Climate Change Global Monitoring
      If we don’t get data, we can’t use it. It is far easier to say, “I never knew”, than “I knew, but didn’t care.”
    2. Delivering climate-resilient water and sanitation to Africa and Asia.
      We can be sure that eliminating funding for these activities will build great good will for the USA in Africa.
    3. Influenza monitoring.
      The WHO provides the USA with the most accurate and rapid identification of new strains of influenza so that we can prepare vaccines in advance of the new flu season. Let’s just eliminate that. No information, no vaccines, more deaths next year and the next and the next.
    4. Nutrition monitoring
    5. Hepatitis monitoring
    6. Ebola monitoring
    7. Children’s Health monitoring
    8. HIV/AIDS monitoringI am not going to go into the hundreds of other programs within the WHO. Pick the disease or area of the world with which you are most concerned, and you can be sure that the WHO has people working on those issues, generally in centers in several different countries.

I do not know of any organization in which I agree with every program or initiative that they have, but I do know that it is impossible to recreate the infrastructure and scope of those programs for the amount of money that we contribute on a yearly basis.

The facts are clear; we get a tremendous amount of advantage in this country from the work that the WHO does. If we only lost the predictive strains of Influenza appearing in the Far East months before they appear here, the ones that allow us to sample them, create vaccines for them, distribute and inoculate our population in advance, we would, if we only lost them, the costs to our country would be in the 10’s of Billions of dollars.

Petulance in the name of responsibility is no prize. Impetuosity in opposition to fiscal responsibility is no virtue. Imposed blindness cannot replace knowledge.