At this year’s World Economic Forum America’s friends and enemies heard about what some are calling a new world order. In Davos, President Trump advanced his own version of Realpolitik. America has its particular interests and he doesn’t mind being fully transparent about them and the actions they portend.
He plainly said that NATO is not forever. His Board of Peace is described as a possible prototype that will displace the UN. Trump has no regard for Biden’s devotion to the “rules based world order” when it really means the US has to pay for everyone else to honor the rules.
This is the reason that while the good and great were chatting it up in Davos the US finalized its withdrawal from the World Health Organization. Trump saw the agency as the worst value for money of all the international institutions the US supports.
The WHO was chartered as part of the UN in 1948 but its funding was left to annual contributions of its member nations. In the current year the US government accounts for 8.7 percent of its $ 7.2 billion budget. Curiously, private funding amounts to $6 billion, including a current gift of $1 billion from the Gates Foundation, the single largest source of WHO’s money. A recipe for capture and corruption is ever there was.
Any pretense of objectivity that might be presumed of an international organization whose declared purpose is to protect the world’s population from communicable disease was notoriously vacated during the global Covid crisis of 2019 when the CDC was in the thrall of China. WHO protected China from other nations concluding that the novel virus was engineered in its Wuhan laboratory.
This alone should have lead to the US withdrawing from the WHO. But, as is now clear, Doctor Fauci was secretly channeling NIH resources to support Wuhan’s efforts to make the virus more deadly.
From its beginning the US has worked to strengthen the WHO’s reputation. The global crusade of the 1980s that wiped out history’s most fatal disease, smallpox, was imagined, managed and paid for by America. Yet, history gives credit to the WHO, just as its does for wiping out polio with a vaccine breakthrough, an achievement of American science. Even now, the US continues to lead the fight again HIV/AIDS in Africa through the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). This has cost American taxpayers $120 billion since President Bush inaugurated the campaign in 2003. The WHO, however, tells the world this effort is guided from Geneva.
President Trump’s decision to quit WHO is well founded as was his shutting USAID. There are no examples of effective organizational reform in the public sector and WHO will never be one. What should be its most valuable asset, comparative information, is so minimal, dated, and inaccurate as to be of no value in making crucial decisions regarding, for instance, the management of epidemics. It is as if WHO never heard of the “information age.”
Yet the world needs a resource to inform efforts to not only respond to global epidemics but one that supports nations working to increase the health status of their citizens. To this end, the US and serious partners should immediately design a successor to the WHO, perhaps a Global Board of Health.
Its singular focus should be to gather, analyze and publish what is referred to in medicine as real world data on the health status of the population of every participating country. The new board should operate on the frontier of data collection encouraging citizen participation, much like advanced versions of WAYZ, encouraging input from the most remote parts of the world relying on technology such as StarLink. Its data should be open to analysis by scientists and “citizen scientists,” intent on democratizing and expanding effective strategies to protect and improve the health of the human family.
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