Announcing today that the U.S. would pull out of the World Health Organization [WHO], 73-year-old President Donald Trump drew criticism far-and-wide for the U.N.’s medical watchdog group the U.S. helped found in 1948. “We will be today terminating out relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs,” Trump said. Trump gave WHO a month April 14 to reform their management team or face severe sanctions from the U.S. Trump wanted 55-year-old WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus out for failing to inform U.N.-member states about the deadly coronavirus AKA CoV-2 or Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Chna. Tedros knew the extent of China’s infections disease crisis but chose to keep a secret of Chinese Preident Xi Jinping, waiting three months before declaring a global pandemic March 11.
WHO “failed to make” the necessary reforms to keep $450 million in U.S. aid intact, showing no signs of Tedros resigning. Tedros proclaimed Jan. 14 that there was no “human-to-human” transmission in Wuhan, when the Chinese Communist Party locked down Wuhan Jan. 23 because of the coronavirus crisis, rapidly engulfing Wuhan’s 15 million population. Bodies were piling up at creamatoriums so quickly, Chinese officials had to ban all in-ground or in-wall funerals, providing free cremation for all Wuhan residents. Yet Tedros, who’d been in close contact with Xi, claimed no “human-to-human transmission. By that time, China sent millions of infected tourists to the United States, Europe and beyond around the 2019 holidays and 2020 Chinese New Year. Tedro’s primary job was to notify U.N.-member states about any prospects for an infections disease crisis.
When Trump announced April 14 that he would suspend all WHO funding pending an investigation, the White House concluded Tedros was negligent notifying U.N. member-states about China’s coronavirus epidemic. Trump told WHO to “commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days” or face consequences. Expecting Tedros to resign, he did the exact opposite, doubled down on how much WHO did to deal with the SARS CoV-2 outbreak. While WHO has an annual budget of $4.84 billion, the U.S. contribution is about $450 million or under 10%. Global health experts weren’t happy with Trump’s decision but overlook WHO’s response to the global coronaviurs pandemic. “This decision is really so short-sighted and ill-advised , and all it does is put American lives at risk,” said Dr. Howard Koh, former assistant secretary of health in the Obama administration.
Trump has his critics like Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) who said, “I disagree wtih the president’s decision.” “Withdrawing U.S. membership could, among other things, interfere with clinical trials that are essential to the development of vaccines, which citizens of the Unites States as well as other in the world need . . . “ Alexander said, who chairs the Senates Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. While criticizing the president, Alexander doesn’t address Tedros’s role in holding a secret for Xi about the Wuhan pandemic for nearly three months. By the that time, the world was already infected. When Trump called WHO China-centric April 7, he saw WHO pandering to China’s wish to maintain secrecy over the global pandemic that’s infected 6,033,876 with 366,894 deaths worldwide. China has expressed no apologies, claiming the virus occurred naturally in Wuhan.
Dr. Tom Frieden, Head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], said he’s not sure Trump can withdraw the U.S. from WHO unilaterally. “It’s questionable whether the president can make a unilateral decision to withdraw from WHO, not understanding the power vested in Article 2, the Executive Branch. Trump has every right to withdraw funding from a corrupt organizations, clearly demonstrated by Tedros during the coronavirus crisis. “It is overreach of his constitutional powers,” said Larry Gostin, director of O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. Gostin thinks, because Congress authorized funding, Congress must pull the funding, not the executive branch. “The only situation where he can do this is if Congress had agreed beforehand to give these powers to the president,” said Kelly Lee, Public Health professor at Simon Fraser University.
Trump faces an uphill battle trying to get public health officials to agree that WHO’s no longer the organization it once was. Clearly, under Tedros’s leadership since 2017, WHO made a big mistake keep China’s dirty little secret about the Wuhan infections disease crisis. Forget about China refusing to allow U.S. and European Union [EU] scientists into the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] where some officials think the cornavirus originated and leaked to Wuhan’s population. WHO can’t explain why it waited until March 11 to declare a global pandemic. Tedros refuses to take responsibility to maintaining Xi’s secret about the viral outbreak in Wuhan. World health officials in the U.S. and abroad look to WHO for guidance on infectious disease outbreaks. When it comes to Tedros, he clearly put his own interests over U.N.-member states when he kept China’s secret about the outbreak in Wuhan.
