The US may put a hold on funding to the World Health Organization, Donald Trump said, during Tuesday’s edition of the daily White House coronavirus briefing.
“When they call every shot wrong, it’s no good”, he added.
Earlier, Trump appeared to suggest the organization is engaged (wittingly or otherwise) in some manner of conspiracy with China, perpetuating a narrative popular among a handful of conservative lawmakers and pundits. “For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric”, the president remarked, in a tweet. “We will be giving that a good look”.
Over the course of his presidency, Trump has variously threatened to pull US financial support for a variety of multilateral institutions. Late last year, he largely succeeded in crippling the WTO, via a spiteful clerical maneuver.
On Tuesday, Trump blamed WHO for “really blowing it” on the coronavirus. He also thanked himself (on your behalf) for closing America’s borders, despite early recommendations from WHO to avoid choking off travel and commerce, as those measures have in some cases proven ineffective in the past.
“Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on”, Trump said, before asking “Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?”
Later, Trump back-tracked a bit: “I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but we’re going to look at it”.
WHO’s funding is split between specified voluntary contributions (77%), assessed contributions (17%), PIP contributions (lots of drug companies) and core voluntary contributions (about 3% each).
These figures can be broken down and dissected every which way, but the following chart is from the “financial flow” section of the organization’s website and captures the breakdown of specified voluntary contributions as of Q4 2019.
As Trump points out, the US is a crucial contributor – and that’s putting it mildly. The idea of cutting funding for the Geneva-based international body altogether in the middle of a public health crisis seems wildly uncouth, but some GOP lawmakers blame Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for certain aspects of the outbreak.
“Once this pandemic is under control, WHO leadership should be held to account. That includes Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has allowed Beijing to use the WHO to mislead the global community”, Marco Rubio said last week. “At this moment, [Tedros] is either complicit or dangerously incompetent”.
That, frankly, is a “dangerously” presumptive thing to say, but all’s fair in love, war and pandemics, I suppose.
Last week, reports suggested the US intelligence community informed the White House that the numbers out of China are intentionally underreported or “fake”, according to sources who spoke to the media. Beijing called the accusations “slander”.
John Bolton on Monday echoed Rubio, accusing WHO of being “an accomplice to China’s massive coverup of COVID-19”. And he went further. “I support efforts by Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz pushing for [the] resignation of WHO director general”, Bolton declared, on the way to accusing Tedros of “misle[ading] the world by blindly trusting a communist regime intent on deception”.
Rubio is, of course, an ardent China hawk, and Bolton has never seen a foreign policy issue that couldn’t be solved with aggression, although Trump’s Ukraine adventures were too much even for John, a man who still defends the Iraq invasion as a decent idea (if that tells you anything about just how untoward the Ukraine operation really was).
The U.N. defended the Director-General. “It is clear that WHO, under the leadership of Dr. Tedros, has done tremendous work on COVID, in supporting countries with millions of pieces of equipment being shipped out, on helping countries with training, on providing global guidelines – WHO is showing the strength of the international health system”, a spokesman told reporters.
For what it’s worth, the WHO has generally refrained from criticizing the White House. “[The] Director General has said Trump was doing a ‘great job’ by using what the president has called a whole-government approach”, Bloomberg notes. “He also praised Trump for leveraging research and development, engaging with the private sector on things such as medical supplies, expanding testing and educating the public”.
Trump doesn’t care. “[They] missed the call”, he snapped, on Tuesday. “They could have called it months earlier”.
The irony in all of this is that WHO’s rationale for recommending against travel bans and border closures sounds quite a bit like the line of reasoning being employed by those who are now arguing from the swift resumption of economic activity in the western world.
“In general, evidence shows that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions”, the organization cautioned, on February 29, the day after things began to unravel in earnest for financial markets. “Furthermore, restrictions may disrupt businesses, and may have negative social and economic effects on the affected countries”, the advisory also warned.
Says the guy who stated in the closing days of February that the virus would just magically disappear by April. My calendar says April 7 today, and Johns Hopkins shows 25,000 new infections today. So, speaking of “blowing it”…
Got to find somebody to blame before the truth is well known.
Even in the midst of a pandemic Trump continues to find ways to alienate every nation and international body on planet earth.
I am not a fan of WHO.
Total budget 2020-2021 is $4.8B.
Only $.3B is spent on medicines & vaccines. Seems like this should be a larger percentage of total budget.
Only $.4B spent on epidemics & pandemics. WHO should be willing to provide some detail on how that money was spent and how it helped the world deal with Covid-19 to justify their $4.8B budget. Why is it ok to slam Washington DC, but give WHO a “free pass” for not being prepared for this pandemic?
Most of the other budget categories are not specific and difficult to understand not only what the money actually gets spent on but how “accountability” could ever be determined/ evaluated.
Too much money not going directly to the people.
Same reason I am not a fan of many charitable organizations- only a small percentage of donations actually get spent on programs for the designated beneficiaries. Overhead and salary take too much of the pie.
American way: Get rich “helping people”.
I don’t believe there is any defense for any response of Trump’s, his administration’s, the federal government’s response, state level response, the Senate and House’s response, or frankly nearly every other highly placed official that so badly underestimated this pandemic. When the alarm bells were going off in China and even a few of their own scientists were trying to alert people it should have been clear how disastrous this could be. Very respected epidemiologists in Hong Kong were screaming at the top of their lungs about how dangerous this was and how quickly it would spread. The genie was out of the bottle by the time they confirmed 10,000 cases. That should have been extremely clear.
The South China Morning Post out of Hong Kong covered the developing situation very well. Their infographics were designed to make the various disease vectors, vulnerable populations, transmission along transportation routes, and realistic forecasting of the epidemiological progression of the disease understandable to children. It was wonderful work that included coverage of what their own experts, who were working very closely with the PRC’s response and the WHO, forecasts. Their own conclusions bucked Beijing’s forecast and predicted widespread transmission in China and predicted that the virus had already escaped the Wuhan/Hubei cordon.
(Here is their own section with all their Coronavirus stories going back to the beginning of their coverage.
https://www.scmp.com/topics/coronavirus-china
They of course were not the only ones covering it, but they are an English publication that put a bright spotlight on it from early on for obvious reasons.)
This was prior to the WHO’s public disavowal of travel bans. (Though if that were a logical response, why praise Beiing’s steps to ban travel out of Wuhan and Hubei?) It was clear at the time that the head of WHO announced that travel bans to and from China were ‘bad’ that they were not working in the best interest of global public health and were working to please the PRC for some other reason. The response from nearly everyone working on the coronavirus story or in the field was incredulous. How could social distancing be required to limit and stop transmission of the virus if travel bans were not part of the solution? The WHO lost its’ credibility at this point.
I may not like Trump, his travel ban to and from China was a little late, and if he had extended it to all international travel at the same time it may have kept the disease to a merely pop-up problem. Like putting out brush fires that a raging forest fire starts by throwing off sparks. But at least he did something when he did against all popular opinion by the chattering classes who ‘knew better’. (I won’t ever vote for him but I’ll give him credit when due even if it pains me)
Trump’s travel ban was horribly implemented and looked like it was designed by teenagers when it came time to start cutting off the rest of the world. But there are no ‘not guilty’ parties. We are led by a class of people who may have nicely pedigreed degrees, but seem lost outside their narrow field and whose response to novel situation makes average joes reacting out of fear seem wise.
I blame everyone. But the leadership of the WHO either is completely incompetent, which I don’t honestly believe, or is guilty of malfeasance and that I do believe.
Trump already told us he accepts no responsibility for this. It’s always somebody else’s fault.
Divide and conquer, truly, and then take a heaping spoonful of the $500 Billion in bailout funds with no one watching.
If anything is clear to me it’s that Covid-19 has exposed the fact that globally, and especially in the US, we are all being governed by rank amateurs who have maintained their positions largely through the inertia of having the job. It turns out that wannabe amateur “leaders” can create a lot of collateral damage in a crisis.