Just how far has journalism strayed when the truth is considered a “stunt”? This fun leftover from Friday, which picked up steam over the holiday weekend, is well worth noting. The progressive-leaning technology magazine Wired labels attempts to blame the World Health Organization for the rapid propagation of the COVID-19 pandemic a “right-wing stunt,” as well as a strategy to avoid blame.
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The only trouble is, Wired’s Robert Wright admits, that WHO actually is to blame — and likely coordinated with China to actively mislead everyone over the Wuhan Flu. Other than that, er, total stunt, I guess:
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Trump expanded his arsenal for dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. He went from a blame-China-not-me strategy to a blame-China-and-the-World-Health-Organization-not-me strategy.
Officials at WHO, Trump said at a press conference, are “very biased toward China”—just look at how, in the early weeks of the outbreak, they “said there’s no big deal, there’s no big problem, there’s nothing.” So Trump will be “looking into” whether to freeze US funding for WHO. …
This is a familiar right-wing move: subject international institutions to scrutiny that, if all goes according to plan, can be used to justify cutting their funding. Then, as the script typically unfolds, global governance fans like me spring to the defense of these institutions.
The “familiar right-wing move,” however, also happens to be based in fact. Wright admits that Trump and the administration have a pretty good case for their argument. He cites the now-infamous WHO declaration that they had “no clear evidence” for community transmission, even as China was disappearing doctors who had been warning about it for weeks:
In this case, though, I’m partly in sync with the right-wing move. I don’t agree with Scott that we should do the investigation ASAP (since at the moment both we and the World Health Organization are kind of, um, busy). And I’m not in favor of cutting WHO funding. I’m also not nearly as sure as Scott that WHO is guilty as charged. But the organization could have performed better in the early stages of the contagion, and there’s at least some reason to suspect that people at WHO knowingly and consequentially misled us. …
The most damning piece of evidence is a WHO tweet on Jan. 14 reporting that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” This came 18 days after a group of doctors notified Wuhan health officials of a disturbing cluster of illnesses, and 14 days after both China’s national government and WHO were officially notified. Is it really plausible that officials in Beijing or at WHO still doubted that the illness was moving from person to person?
Wright then offers a case for plausibility … and discards it. Instead of drawing the clear lesson from this sequence — that WHO operates as a propaganda cover for China — Wright argues that the US should keep funding them in order to deal with the pandemic:
Once this pandemic has abated, sober reflection on it can lead to improvements in WHO and in the response of nations to future contagions that start within their borders.
We should pour a billion dollars into an organization that deliberately misled us and cost tens of thousands of lives in so doing because they might suddenly become useful now? That money would be put to better use in any number of ways in this pandemic, especially under current WHO management. They have made it clear that they value Beijing’s patronage more than “world health,” which makes their “organization” not just useless but actively contradictory to their ostensible mission.
That’s apparently what the White House thinks, too:
President Trump is likely to announce restrictions on U.S. funding for the World Health Organization this week over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as the administration and conservative allies ramped up their criticism that the United Nations agency catered to China early in the outbreak and jeopardized global health. …
At issue are ongoing voluntary U.S. payments to the United Nations health body, based in Geneva. The United States is the largest single donor to the WHO, with “assessed” or mandatory funding and larger voluntary contributions that often go to fund specific projects or crisis response.
The United States has provided the agency with $893 million during its current two-year funding period, the health news website statnews.com calculated last week. Funding varies year by year. Chinese contributions are a fraction of that.
Republicans in Congress are seeking documents from the WHO and calling for investigations of contacts between WHO officials and Chinese government officials. The White House backs those efforts but could hold up funding before results are in.
“The money is not guaranteed if WHO does not do its mission,” a senior administration official said.
If WHO wants to be taken credibly, then its current management — the group that actively misled the world to cover for China — needs to resign immediately. New leadership needs to come from the nations who suffered the most impact from China’s lying and WHO’s cover-up, and that needs to happen now. Until it does, not one red penny should flow in its direction, and the rest of the world should work on its own to deal with this crisis and later global health issues.
That’s no “stunt.” That’s just common sense.