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.
The nonsense in this thread is really painful to read. No, the WHO is not politically controlled by China.
I work and live in DC and that’s a forgone conclusion here.
Since I can’t ask you for evidence of China NOT controlling the WHO, maybe I can put it to HN:
Does anybody have a good article for this person to read about China and the WHO?
Maybe google “WHO China Influence”. There are thousands of articles.
Oh ok, that makes it true then.
> Does anybody have a good article for this person to read about China and the WHO?
How about you go and try to educate yourself a bit about what the WHO actually is and how it is governed before making a fool of yourself like this? The only circles where people really believe that the United Nations and the WHO are run by the Chinese are those that you probably don't want to be associated with.
What do you say to articles like this one?
"Its international experts didn’t get access to the country until Director-General Tedros Adhanom visited President Xi Jinping at the end of January. Before then, WHO was uncritically repeating information from the Chinese authorities, ignoring warnings from Taiwanese doctors—unrepresented in WHO, which is a United Nations body—and reluctant to declare a “public health emergency of international concern, ..."
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-h...
If you have a problem with that you should probably lay it at the feet of the Chinese government officials that did that. But Adhanom did visit and did in fact get the Chinese to cooperate.
The Taiwan/China issue is obviously a very sensitive one to the Chinese and this has muddied the waters, as has - probably - an initial attempt by China to wipe this under the carpet. The end result is that the pandemic has probably become worse than it could have been but:
- Subsequent events, even after much more knowledge had been gathered by the West did not lead to substantially different policies in Western countries, if anything the countermeasures were - and still are - too late and too lax.
- The WHO does appear to have learned some lessons from this pandemic.
- The prevention paradox is real: if the WHO had sounded a massive alarm early on and had been found to be wrong then they would have been hard pressed to do this again at some point in the future because everybody would have called them the boy that cried wolf. But this time there was a wolf, and this time wasn't helped by the previous times that WHO raised the alarm and no pandemic at a massive scale occurred. Note that it doesn't really matter whether we prevented it successfully or whether it would have fizzled out.
- Finally, it is super easy to criticize from the sidelines, I think the WHO has a nearly impossible mission, to get a very large number of countries to collaborate in spite of a whole raft of political complications, egos and other bullshit. Given that they did a commendable job, I hope they will put the lessons learned to good effect, they did more than any single government in the world to help combat this pandemic.
This was simply because at that time there wasn't any evidence to the contrary, which, unfortunately turned out to be not true once more evidence came out.
You know what? We still don't have the whole picture, and we will still come to conclusions that hindsight will tell us is wrong.
But that doesn't mean you need to attribute all of that to malice or control by the Chinese.
For one you are trying to prove a negative, for another, you are asking others to prove a negative, when in fact it should be the opposite: there should be some pretty hard proof before a lab leak hypothesis would even rise to the same level of consideration that a zoonotic jump (which is default) should be given. Absent such evidence you can safely discard it, and if and when such (non circumstantial) evidence does surface it would be a good time to get seriously upset about it. But until then it is a complete non-issue, except in those places that seem to go out of their way to make this a 'China has tried to destroy the world and then tried to cover it up' story, none of which seems to match the available evidence. That said, the Chinese have not made their own story any better with their initial handling of the pandemic and the degree to which they were transparent with the data that they must have already had at their disposal. But that is nothing that can't be explained by their usual reluctance to own up to fuck-ups. Other countries (the Russian Federation, and the United States, India and plenty of others besides) have done similar if not worse things, it seems to be a political reflex: try to squelch the problem in an attempt to avoid blame. This of course doesn't work and only makes things worse.
But ultimately, that is not a WHO problem, but a UN problem (parent of the WHO) and one that we will sooner or later have to take care of. Similar nonsense surrounds various other countries in the world with everybody tiptoeing around the problem.
China spent ages blocking Taiwan from the discussion and succeeded as the WHO had to appease the CCP.
Seems like chinas influence on the WHO is a lot.
Only very few countries tried to do this (with specifically calling this a Chinese Virus) but that did quite a bit of damage to the WHOs mission of trying to help curb the pandemic.
You can accuse the WHO of a lot of things (for instance: not calling a pandemic early enough and not being far more pro-active in calling for governments to curb the spread), but the problem there is that they can't sound the alarm too often too early before people will start to ignore them, which is just one more variation of the prevention paradox.
I'm not sure if I agree that they did or didn't call it early enough. But lying to the public is what rubs me the wrong way. The WHO should not contain any politics, but that's exactly what it has done the entire time. They spent more time pandering to the CCP than being a /World Health Organization/.
While china was telling the world it's racist for calling it the Wuhan Virus or Wuhan Flu, it's own state run media was continuing to call it that despite the WHO giving it a name.
When we knew it was human transmissible, the WHO was parroting the CCP telling us it's not. When countries were stopping flights. The WHO was telling everyone not to stop flights. China was stopping flights while telling America it's racist for stopping flights.
At some point we need to ignore the child throwing its toys out of the cot and focus on the actual issue.
Where do you even get this nonsense? Seriously, do you really believe that the WHO spent more time pandering to the CCP than to being a World Health Organization? If you do then I am really at a loss on how to get you out of that because it is so far from what I've seen that I suspect you are looking at this through some kind of lens that magnifies the relatively insignificant first two weeks or so relative to the remainder of what is now almost two years of non-stop effort to help curb this pandemic.
They certainly aren't perfect, but at least they are trying and the bulk of the people that are - unsuccessfully - trying to link this to some kind of shadowy Chinese control are typically found on the extremes of the spectrum trying hard to assign blame for all this rather than to get it resolved.
This is explicitly false. The WHO did not argue for strong countermeasures from “day #1”. They didn’t even acknowledge human to human transmission until late January 2020 (https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/status/1219478547644813312?s=20 ). Here they are recommending against the general use of masks at the end of January 2020. (https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1269003/retrieve). Here’s Tedros himself saying travel bans are not needed in February 2020 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...). The WHO only declared a pandemic in March 2020, apparently because they thought such a declaration would cause governments and individuals to give up (https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/who-declares-the-coronav...). All this after Taiwan initially warned the WHO in December 2019 (https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...).
The WHO absolutely did fail us and your claimed narrative is false.
The information that they had was flawed and incomplete, which is enough to understand the degree to which they felt the need to sound the alarm.
The only people who are rabidly blaming the WHO for 'failing us' are the ones that would like to distract from the people the really failed us: the politicians that decided to ignore the information coming out of the WHO and that refused to act on it. Those governments that went a step further and played it safe did considerably better, but do note that those very same groups that are blaming the WHO are claiming that these countries only managed to do so by curbing people's freedoms, by abusing their population and so on.
On another note, the people who continuously talk about 'narratives' tend to be the ones that are most invested in sowing chaos and dissent as well as distrust in those authorities working hard to help us get out of this. The practical upshot of this is that you may succeed in undermining the sentiment that the WHO is a useful organization but that will not change the facts on the ground, and the isolationism that this is closely related to tends to be strongly associated with people who would like to reduce the world to little fiefdoms without such niceties as the UN, the WHO, the International Criminal Court etc. Be careful whose water you carry.
Pandemics are - by definition - a global problem and trying to solve these with local countermeasures (aka, take care of the West and forget about the rest) isn't going to work: until such a thing is under control everywhere it might as well not be under control anywhere.
The current mess is there to a large degree because countries have been ignoring the WHO, not because they followed the WHO and their advice turned out to be nonsense.
If anything the WHO should have been more strict in their initial reading of the situation and I'm pretty sure that they have learned their lesson, but the prevention paradox is real and if they had cried 'wolf' too early they would have been abused by the same people that now claim that they messed up because they didn't react soon enough and strong enough.
From day #1 the WHO has been arguing for strong countermeasures rather than to slow-walk it to see how bad it was going to get because time lost will not be won back during a pandemic.
WHO Press briefing March 13th 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRHH6e-y6I
The WHO did not fail us, but politicians certainly did.