The WHO is seeking a new treaty on handling future pandemics

I share that distrust for a few reasons:

1. They blindly repeated the CCP’s claims that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t seem to exhibit human to human transmission, as late as mid-January 2020. Remember, there were widespread reports of a pneuomonia-like illness in Wuhan in December. We later learned that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized as early as November. China’s own formal notice to WHO of the outbreak was done at the end of December. Around a week after the WHO provided broken guidance, China publicly announced that there is human to human transmission, and it still took the WHO a week past that to correct their guidance. I just don’t see how the WHO could possibly provide such broken guidance so late and for so long.

2. They allowed the CCP to escape accountability for over a year with their site visit in early 2021. I know they can’t force their way in and rely on UN member states for “power” but I feel like they were willing to happily ignore the possibility of a lab leak instead of pushing hard for a timely investigation on site (applying pressure publicly and seeking help from other nations). After their brief site visit in 2021, Tedros (head of WHO) seemed very ready to rule out a lab leak, and only a small set of brave scientists and investigative journalists have allowed this theory to return to legitimacy and receive the attention it deserves despite being shouted down by the “trust the science” crowd.

3. The WHO has not used their authority/weight as an institution in helpful ways. For example, they have pushed back against travel bans and other such measures that would at least buy countries time. At the end of January 2020, Tedros literally said there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade”. More recently, the WHO has repeatedly claimed that countries seeking to protect their own people first are “hoarding” vaccines, which is absurd.

4. The WHO seems to be very deeply political. Whether it is about sparing the CCP from scrutiny or following “woke” protocol on how to name viruses and variants, they simply don’t feel like a neutral organization. The phrase “trust the science” is so overused that it is essentially meaningless, but the WHO is one of those very organizations that make me think that what we have come to call “science” is very prone to political corruption. They also seem to regularly put China’s interests ahead of the US, despite the US providing 15% of the WHO’s funding (China funds 0.21%).

5. There are other issues with WHO from before COVID. They were simply not as apparent since they didn’t affect Americans. Look at the 2014 Ebola outbreak and how the WHO handled it - by their own admission, they were completely incompetent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_virus_ep...).

Organizations are driven by incentives. The incentives haven’t changed, therefore organizations haven’t learned their lesson.

Second, nations exist to serve their populations. Think xenophobia and racism are bad now? Wait until it’s life or death and a decision is now directly attributable to the deaths of those around you.

“Sorry Aunt Edna, you have to die. A factory worker in Mexico got your vaccine so they can make cars for an American company.”

The WHO is politically controlled by China and that’s not going away. Any proposal to let the WHO have sovereignty over the USA in any form, this is DOA. Without USA, what’s the point?

That said, maybe there are common grounds or infrastructure that can be build collectively, similar to the space station that everyone funds and benefits from in a pre agreed upon way.

On a whole, the world is better off with the FDA's and their equivalent per nation. They approve and oversee the distribution of health and food products and set out minimum guidelines that influence how said products are marketed, recalled or banned; which on balance is a positive for society in the absence of a better regulatory body.

By definition, these groups are political though. Almost none of them conduct their own studies, relying almost entirely on what the manufacturers provide them. And all of them have limited practical ability and experience to actually enforce their guidelines. What are they are exceptionally good at though is reviewing submitted trials and monitoring for adverse effects. Some people get hurt when dangerous products are given pre-approval / full-approval, but this is mitigated by quick recalls / banning.

So to your question, political bodies likes the FDA's are a benefit to the greater populace and by extension the medical community. Keeping the obvious scams and harmful products out of general reach from the population is a pretty clear positive.

> IMO China’s influence is more because they did a great job at committing hard to diplomacy and working relationships at WHO at the exact same time the US pulled away. It turns out diplomacy and leadership matter.

This seems completely revisionist to me. You really think China’s influence was justified in January and February 2020? This is before Trump first criticized the WHO (early April 2020). The US was funding 15% of the WHO’s overall budget, more than twice as much as the next nearest country (the UK), and more than 70x what China funded. What exact levers did China pull “for the last several years” that the US didn’t? It seems to me like the US did far more to support the WHO than anyone else.

> The WHO is politically controlled by China

The nonsense in this thread is really painful to read. No, the WHO is not politically controlled by China.