11–20 of 127 posts
> It is an open secret among international diplomats and public health experts that WHO is “not fit for mission” (as one of them put it to me), riddled with politics and bureaucracy. Given its previous failures and the warning that was Sars, its leadership has no excuse for reacting so oddly, and so tardily, to the current crisis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The WHO arguably made the pandemic worse by discouraging the use of masks, propagating information that turned out to be false and dangerous saying there was no human-to-human interaction and generally sided with china in the informational flow. Easier to ignore the WHO if you don't give them any money.
As bad as WHO may be, the US Federal government was and is far worse on all the same points. Swapping in Trump and Kushner for WHO is not an improvement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As bad as WHO may be, the US Federal government was and is far worse on all the same points. Swapping in Trump and Kushner for WHO is not an improvement.
As far as I was aware the US government issued a travel ban on China while the WHO was still wrongly claiming travel bans are ineffective. Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china... "Tedros, as he is called, said the WHO does not recommend limiting either trade or travel to China at this time. “In fact, we oppose it,” he said. The health organization said it would question border closures…
South Korea never issued a travel ban.
In order for a travel ban to be effective, it has to be for all incoming travelers. Not just for a specific country.
Lots of commenters have pointed out a pattern of increasing failures and shortcoming by the WHO, which I wasn't aware of, but I still have to think: don't we need a centralized touchstone for these kinds of crises? Even if the WHO needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, isn't a dysfunctional one better than nothing at all?
This was long overdue. > It is an open secret among international diplomats and public health experts that WHO is “not fit for mission” (as one of them put it to me), riddled with politics and bureaucracy. Given its previous failures and the warning that was Sars, its leadership has no excuse for reacting so oddly, and so tardily, to the current crisis. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/who-must-answer/
Perhaps. However, Trump's using the WHO as scapegoat for his grievous mishandling of the situation - starting in 2018 - is beyond unscrupulous.
The WHO is a joke. What they did these last months should be the last nail in the coffin. More like a health organization they act like a political one taking sides with China and ignoring/censoring Taiwan even if they managed to control de spread of the virus.[1][2] And if that wasn't enough, they actively insisted that all the measures we're taking now were pointless. Why would anyone want a health organization tha…
I lack a lot of context here, but I recently saw a tweet of theirs from January. It was jarring to see how much they uncritically went along with China’s narrative about the virus. I understand a lot about the situation is unprecedented and especially in early weeks there was a lot of confusion and a lot of unknowns. But hopefully this at least will spur them to act more cautiously in regard to info from China.
After all, the WHO Director-General claimed within the last week without a shred of evidence that he was subject to racist and derogatory attacks from Taiwan's leaders.
This is after WHO threw Taiwan under the bus and denied them access to critical health information on the express orders from China.
The entire organization is corrupt. Blindly repeating CCP propaganda and punishing China's enemies is not the sign of a healthy organization.
Their recommendations were, at times, completely false.
Lots of commenters have pointed out a pattern of increasing failures and shortcoming by the WHO, which I wasn't aware of, but I still have to think: don't we need a centralized touchstone for these kinds of crises? Even if the WHO needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, isn't a dysfunctional one better than nothing at all?
An example, WHO really said:
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission"
which is realistic and prudent. But in this thread an in every other place on internet, it is interpreted by US people as:
"there is no human-to-human transmission"
which is downright crazy.
Also, I see a lot of mixing with Taiwan issues, even though the particular data about the pandemics in this country (and yes I am in favor of Taiwan independence, but that does not matter, and that's my point) did not change at all the scientific and public health conclusions and advises to be taken. In other words, to do their public health job, the WHO had absolutely no need to quote Taiwan in particular. Of course they also considered not angering China and so refrained to speak of Taiwan because of that too, but it would be the same for any of the UNO Security Council countries' delicate issues, including US.
If WHO was to be rebuilt upon better bases, everybody would benefit from it. But cutting its funds?? It's stupid.
PS: another point, UNO scientific organs really are just the sum of their individual countries' parts. It should not, it should be larger and better than its parts, but that's just not the case. Their is no "WHO laboratory" etc, there are just specialists from participating countries that share their own labs data (or not). To change that, it would need more funding (not less!) to own its own labs, facilities, research programs, etc.
Lots of commenters have pointed out a pattern of increasing failures and shortcoming by the WHO, which I wasn't aware of, but I still have to think: don't we need a centralized touchstone for these kinds of crises? Even if the WHO needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, isn't a dysfunctional one better than nothing at all?
It's only "better than nothing at all" if you assume that any action it could take is better than doing nothing. That doesn't seem to have been true recently to me. Was https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19 better than nothing?
To solve that, a reform is needed. But absolutely not by cutting its funds, which is silly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As bad as WHO may be, the US Federal government was and is far worse on all the same points. Swapping in Trump and Kushner for WHO is not an improvement.
As far as I was aware the US government issued a travel ban on China while the WHO was still wrongly claiming travel bans are ineffective. Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china... "Tedros, as he is called, said the WHO does not recommend limiting either trade or travel to China at this time. “In fact, we oppose it,” he said. The health organization said it would question border closures…