The current administration has spent the entire last year trying to deflect criticism for their bungled response, and have been throwing accusations of corruption and incompetence at anything that moves.

At least earlier on the narrative was that "the WHO is in the pocket of China" [1] -- while in reality of course the Americans were a dramatically bigger contributor both financially and politically. Further at the same time, the Chinese were actually threatening the WHO and leadership for not playing ball.

Typical 2020 dumpster fire. And at the end of the day the people really hurt are once again the poor countries who depend on the WHO, and we're left with a pile of sadly misinformed "they have no credibility" armchair quarterbacks. It's always easier to try and tear down a system than understand and fix. That's my opinion anyways.

For a more balanced take I suggest this Atlantic piece [2].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-pompeo-who-workd-health...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/world-h...

> For a more balanced take I suggest this Atlantic piece

This made me laugh out loud

LOL..I knew the folks here would hate that. Seriously though, the idea that the Atlantic and balanced takes, particularly within the last few years can be used in the same sentence un-ironically is indeed a joke.

I don't have anything against your reaction. I don't read the Atlantic; I saw this particular article, read it, lined up the facts with other things I'd read, and felt this piece reflected a more balanced take than mine. Not necessarily in absolute terms. That is what I meant by my note about balance.

I suppose next time I reply to a contentious topic I could find a more seemingly dispassionate source but these days most folks are too polarized to read any news source that doesn't align with their preconceived notions.

For the intellectually curious, in what way?

The Atlantic is a neo-lib magazine that leftists and right-wingers can agree is not even worth using as toilet paper.

The WHO is a political organization - much like the WIPO, WTO, UN and many others. It does not exist for the benefit of mankind, but rather for the benefit of its member states - and those have differing agendas.

Current WHO head was elected in part thanks to chinese votes and influence. When the WHO recommended not closing any borders, how can you disentangle the professional epidemiology opinion from the political push? You can't.

Which is not to say it is evil or incompetent (it may be either, both, or none - I don't know enough) - but it seems to have an aura of "professional only" organization, which is unjustified.

Unfortunately, the whole polio eradication thing is less of an clear-cut success story than the headlines made it seem - they only eradicated wild-type polio, there are still major outbreaks in Africa of vaccine-derived polioviruses that have lost the mutations which made them safe and started spreading in the community and paralyzing people, those have only been getting more widespread last I heard and there doesn't seem to be any clear route to a solution. Can't imagine that Covid has helped much with that either, given the disruption to vaccination programs worldwide - vaccine-derived poliovirus outbreaks thrive wherever vaccination is disrupted or incomplete, or there's a border between vaccinated and non-vaccinated regions.

The original plan that the WHO and the rest of the global health community came up to deal with this also seems like total magical thinking to me - basically, everywhere would drop the type 2 poliovirus component (which corresponded to a virus whose wild type had been eliminated) from their live vaccines at once, which would leave none to turn into vaccine-derived poliovirus and type 2 woud just go away. It didn't work that way. I can't fathom why it even should. Nonetheless, there were lots of fancy documents and presentations from the WHO and other such organisations explaining this strategy very hopefully. The current ones don't have the same level of hope.

> I can't fathom why it even should. Nonetheless, there were lots of fancy documents and presentations from the WHO and other such organisations explaining this strategy very hopefully.

I can fathom this easily. The general idea is to administer the type 2 oral vaccine (along with 1 and 3, but we’re talking about type 2 here) widely enough that you expect a high level of herd immunity. Specifically, you want sufficient immunity that any newly introduced cases of reverted-to-virulent type 2 will quickly die out. (If you have the resources, you also try to give almost everyone the injectable vaccine to prevent virulent type 2 cases from causing damage). Then you stop giving the type 2 vaccine. If it works, then type 2 is locally eradicated.

Maybe it’s “magical”, but this particular magic has worked in almost the entire world.

This seems like antivax advocacy. WHO would point out that vaccines have likely prevented over 13,000,000 cases of polio, while cPDVD has caused fewer than 800 cases.

Please explain why you're downvoting, this is a fact, only wild polio is "eradicated" from africa, not vaccine-induced polio (type 1 and type 2 are often milder than wild polio however). And i think there was a polio outbreak in Soudan this year, so...