Trump Pulls US From WHO Over China Concerns
The Trump Administration this week notified the World Health Organization of its imminent withdrawal from the agency due to its failure to adequately respond to COVID-19 and its loyalty to China.
“The President has been clear that the WHO needs to get its act together,” said State Department spokesperson. “That starts with demonstrating significant progress and the ability to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks with transparency and accountability.”
Critics say the move will obstruct global efforts to find a COVID-19 vaccine, though the exit would not take effect until next summer.
“I disagree with the president’s decision,” argues Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Chairman of the chamber’s health committee. “Certainly there needs to be a good, hard look at mistakes the WHO might have made in connection with coronavirus, but the time to do that is after the crisis has been dealt with, not in the middle of it.”
The withdrawal was condemned by groups including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Physicians.
“This dangerous withdrawal not only impacts the global response against COVID-19, but also undermines efforts to address other major public health threats,” wrote the groups in a joint statement. “We call on Congress to reject the Administration’s withdrawal from the WHO and make every effort to preserve the United States’ relationship with this valued global institution. Now is the time to invest in global health, rather than turn back.”
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has already stated that he will reverse Trump’s decision if he is elected in November: “Americans are safer when America is engaged in strengthening global health,” tweeted Biden. “On my first day as President, I will rejoin the WHO and restore leadership on the world stage.”
If Trump is re-elected and the US exits the WHO, it will be the first time a government has ever left the agency.
President Trump suspended funding to the WHO in April amid claims that the agency had helped China suppress information about COVID-19 and had ignored early warnings about the severity of the disease. In May, Trump signaled his intentions to withdraw from the agency after it “failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms.”
In the meantime, COVID-19 cases continue to increase throughout the United States including 400,000 new cases identified during the holiday weekend. In total, more than 130,000 Americans have died from the disease.
The United States is by far the WHO’s largest donor (contributing 15% of its total budget) and it is unclear if the agency can survive without its support.
Author’s Note: The WHO could have prevented a lot of death around the world, but instead chose to prioritize its relationship with China. This agency is corrupt beyond repair.
In the words of Rep. James Comer (R-KY): “China lied, the WHO complied, and Americans died.”
Trump is right – withdraw.
Doctors talk to each other – they know what is going on in the world.
WHO does not keep secrets.
The USA does not need to fund an overblown agency sucking money away with no results.
Alice-The bulk of the first section of your post deals with why it was dumb to withdraw from the WHO, then you finish up with a paragraph stating that the organization is beyond repair. Since that paragraph is not credited to anyone, I suspect those are your thoughts. What background do you have to make that assertion? I will make another assumption, that you are just parroting the current resident of the WH, who is leaning on that idea so people don’t focus on his disastrous response to the epidemic. Not disastrous you say? Look no further than our neighbor to the north to see that is total BS. Did the WHO give them a secret heads up that allowed them to perform so much better than the US? We know that the answer is leadership. The move to pull us from the WHO is totally political, while I am sure that the organization is imperfect, you don’t improve things from the outside. But this is Trump’s modus operandi, just withdraw from whatever he doesn’t like, with no replacement in sight. He has done it with Obamacare, the Iran nuclear treaty, the Paris accord and now this. And they say the “left” is the “cancel culture”. Time for conservatives to wake up and vote this disaster out of office…
Agree with your article about President Pulling US From WHO Over China Concerns.
-“12/31/19 Taiwan emailed WHO about suspected human-to-human transmission of the virus in China’s Hubei province.
-The WHO denied that Taiwan alerted it about the possibility of human-to-human transmissions in the 12/31 email.
-China’s Foreign Ministry forcefully rejected the implication that it pressured the WHO to ignore Taiwan’s early warnings.
-“CHINA knew Covid-19 was a “clearly contagious” coronavirus in December yet failed to inform global health authorities, a new report shows.
-At least five laboratories in the country confirmed the existence of the deadly bug yet Beijing did not tell officials at the World Health Organization for another TEN days.
-As late as Jan. 14, the WHO was tweeting that Chinese investigators had found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
-It wasn’t until 10 days later that the WHO announced that there was evidence that the disease was highly contagious and was passed from person to person. Four days after China reported it.
-The regime also waited until January 20 to admit that the coronavirus could be transmitted from human to human, The Mail on Sunday reports.
-Another report claims the CIA believes China threatened the WHO into delaying warnings about Covid-19 while it hoarded medical supplies.
-According to the document, Beijing told the World Health Organization they would stop working with them if the agency declared a global health emergency.
-The alleged pressure in January enabled China to stockpile crucial medical equipment while the coronavirus – which started in Wuhan late last year – spread around the world, reports Newsweek.
-Two US intelligence sources confirmed the contents of the CIA report,
-A third intelligence report, this time from German spies, claims Xi Jinping personally pressured the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus into downplaying the risk of the virus.
-1/30/20- WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency
-1/31/20-The Trump administration first made the announcement they would restrict foreign nationals recently in China from entering the U.S. They also announced that some Americans who recently traveled to the country would be put into quarantine for a time upon their arrival back to the U.S. The novel coronavirus first originated in Wuhan, China.
-Trump’s announcement sparked severe backlash from media outlets who rushed to find experts willing to bash the decision, Lyndsey Fifield, social media manager for The Heritage Foundation, noted on Twitter.
-The New York Times wrote that the decision “sent shocks through the stock market and rattled industries that depend on the flow of goods and people between the world’s two largest economies” in its Jan. 31 article. The publication added that “some public health and policy experts” believed the restrictions would do nearly nothing to help contain the virus.
-“At this point, sharply curtailing air travel to and from China is more of an emotional or political reaction, said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota,” according to the NYT article.
-2/01/20 A tweet Biden posted the day after the Trump administration announced travel restrictions on people who were in China 14 days prior to their attempted entry into the United States.
-Biden tweeted: “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”
-Since then, the Democrats have done everything in their power to cause Covid-19 to spread in the US including: encouraging people to sneak over the border who are not tested, allow untested and unknown criminals live in sanctuary cities, release contagious convicted criminals from prison, force hospitals to place contagious out-patients in nursing homes, allow riots to continue with people who are not social distancing, allowing bogus testing data to be the basis for decisions on how to run their states, allow medicare to pay out huge sums of money to hospitals when doctors determine Covid-19 to be the cause of death when whistleblowers have repeatedly found discrepancies in the actual cause of death.
-The US has no more cases of Covid-19 than Canada does. Canada has socialized medicine and no incentive to falsify death certificates for medicare money like the US does. Without this incentive, numbers would be the same.