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Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

nytimes.com

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Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#91

Post by simonh »

MR4D wrote: post #47
simonh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make changes in the WHO fine, you contribute a major share if it’s funding, you should get a commensurate say, but de-funding right now at the height of the crisis is ludicrously reckless and irresponsible. Are you really going to argue this move right now is in the best interests of the USA and the world? From a life long Conservative voter here in the UK, this is serious. Get a grip. I never thought…

Why is it reckless? The WHO has arguably made the problem worse. Wouldn’t you want to defund any organization that makes a problem worse?

You’re seriously telling me that the work they are doing right now World wide is making the situation worse?

This is classic Trump. Instead of taking effective action, he’s picking a fight because he knows his supporters will rally round, his opponents will be enraged and now it’s a partisan bun fight. De-funding the WHO is an appalling attack on the worlds ability to fight this pandemic. What is Trumps plan to actually help solve this problem?

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#92

Post by Leherenn »

henearkr wrote: post #19
cjbprime wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

WHO advised the world to perform as many tests as possible. And that was an excellent advice, only it was ignored and not taken seriously. That's an example where the WHO is not the problem but its enforcement capability (just the same problem with UN decisions on war zones, which can never be enforced). To solve that, a reform is needed. But absolutely not by cutting its funds, which is silly.

I don't think it was ignored, it just wasn't possible in most places.

As far as I know, most countries are ramping their testing facilities as fast as possible, some are just more effective or had a head start.

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#93

Post by Gibbon1 »

MR4D wrote: post #47
simonh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make changes in the WHO fine, you contribute a major share if it’s funding, you should get a commensurate say, but de-funding right now at the height of the crisis is ludicrously reckless and irresponsible. Are you really going to argue this move right now is in the best interests of the USA and the world? From a life long Conservative voter here in the UK, this is serious. Get a grip. I never thought…

Why is it reckless? The WHO has arguably made the problem worse. Wouldn’t you want to defund any organization that makes a problem worse?

And replace it with what? Nothing?

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#94

Post by evgen »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #40
sg47 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as dangerous as calling it a democratic hoax or that it'll go down to zero or like a miracle, it'll go away one day.

I don't think any people died from those things.

The body count from those statements will probably be in the mid-100k or so. By instantly trying to politicise any criticism of his many failures Trump incited his moron followers to ignore the situation in the critical early weeks. States resisted shutdowns to score points with their cheetoh-fuhrer and that will end up killing thousands.

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#95

Post by simonh »

draw_down wrote: post #9
Darmody wrote: post #7

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.

The fact is when the WHO was ringing every alarm bell they could reach, and the CIA and CDC was warning of an imminent threat, Trump was calling it a hoax. If you’re so insistent on punishing those that missed opportunities to take the threat seriously, a bit of consistency in that would be appreciated.

The crucial contribution the WHO made was forcing the Chinese to revise their reporting system and publish accurate infection counts in mid January. They could only do that once they had a team on the ground working with the Chinese and that required Chinese cooperation. Up to that point they and we were utterly reliant on China for information.

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#96

Post by possibleworlds »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #89

Quite surprised to see how many comments here agree with the decision. It is quite clear that the WHO have to placate the CCP in order to avoid China withdrawing it's cooperation in its entirety. Yes, China has not been fully transparent, but it has been a significant improvement from SARS in 2003. It seems many people here have bought into the reactionary blame game and failed to consider the diplomacy requirements…

Also, this move is 100% Trump deflecting attention from the narrative of his own mis-management. He doesn't care about WHO, he probably didn't even know it existed until a few weeks ago.

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#97

Post by Melting_Harps »

possibleworlds wrote: post #96
bad_good_guy wrote: post #89

Quite surprised to see how many comments here agree with the decision. It is quite clear that the WHO have to placate the CCP in order to avoid China withdrawing it's cooperation in its entirety. Yes, China has not been fully transparent, but it has been a significant improvement from SARS in 2003. It seems many people here have bought into the reactionary blame game and failed to consider the diplomacy requirements…

Also, this move is 100% Trump deflecting attention from the narrative of his own mis-management. He doesn't care about WHO, he probably didn't even know it existed until a few weeks ago.

  Also, this move is 100% Trump deflecting attention from the narrative of his own mis-management. He doesn't care about WHO, he probably didn't even know it existed until a few weeks ago.
Trump is an imbecile, and at best a useful idiot for Big Business, but that doesn't take away that the WHO has lost all credibility given how they have conducted themselves thus far. So, if nothing else I'm willing to say that he has done well by de-funding the US' portion of the WHO. What its replaced with is what the focus should really be, not Trump.

But, I'd go so far as to say that I hope this reduces the rest of the World's reliance on China once and for all as we have seen the perils it has caused, which incidentally has also been a narrative of his. Although that really hasn't come to fruition despite all the trade war rhetoric, so I'd say he has failed and not gone far enough.

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#98

Post by distances »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #39
rasengan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHO is funded by Bill Gates [1]. [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful...

Gates' father was a pal of Soros and Fauci. https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1248480455826870282

Is this supposed to be a positive or negative fact? I know Soros is somewhat of a philanthropist but haven't heard of Fauci, and you bringing this up makes it sound accusatory.

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#99

Post by [deleted] »

Darmody wrote: post #7

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…

[deleted]

Re: Trump Halts U.S. Funding of World Health Organization

#100

Post by netsharc »

_bxg1 wrote: post #14

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?

Imagine if the virus came along during the Hillary administration. The not-dismantled pandemic team [1] catches wind of the problems in Wuhan as early as the beginning of January, and informs the President as well as the WHO. The still-functioning State Department asks around in China and brings good information. As the WHO encounters resistance in China [2], the secretary of state makes phone calls and manages to negotiate permission for them to do their work there (who knows, maybe in reality Pompeo did this, but their track record makes me doubt that).

In this universe though, the Trump admin didn't contribute anything to the WHO (I'm assuming), and is now bitching and moaning that they were ineffective...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/trump-turns-...:

> Announcing the cut in funding on Tuesday, Trump accused the WHO of failing to send its experts to the source of the outbreak to gather samples. That failure decisively set back the effect to contain the pandemic, he claimed.

> In fact Beijing blocked a WHO delegation from visiting Wuhan in the first weeks of the outbreak. The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had to fly to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping on 29 January to negotiate entry and information sharing. A WHO team was allowed to visit Wuhan on 22 February.

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