President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin the World Health Organization without preconditions was foolish. Now, the organization is making itself an even greater mockery of the credibility that Washington is lending it.
The WHO recently welcomed Syria and Belarus to its executive board. That’s Syria tyrannized by a dictator, Bashar Assad, who has murdered his own citizens with chemical weapons. And that’s the Belarus that Alexander Lukashenko has turned into a prison state and where he recently committed an act of piracy by forcing down a civilian airliner to arrest a passenger who was a political nuisance. Both these pariah nations now sit on the board of the WHO, an organization that proclaims itself “trusted to serve public health at all times.”
Are you proud of this, President Biden?
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, another authoritarian state with a record of using chemical weapons, also sits on the WHO board. The WHO coddled China, which allowed the spread of COVID-19 across the globe and has scuttled any effort by the organization to launch a plausible investigation of the pandemic’s origins. Taiwan, which issued early warnings about the severity of the virus, continues to be sidelined by the WHO, which does China’s bidding.
Why did Biden rejoin the organization almost immediately upon being inaugurated? Does he really think that the presence of the United States will reform the body and end the tendency to cover for and promote authoritarian states? Evidently, America’s sheepish reentry into the august international organization hasn’t influenced WHO decision-making so far.
Throwing money at it won’t solve the problem either. The U.S. has spent $3.5 billion on the WHO since 2010 and, in exchange, has received an abysmal response to the worst pandemic in a century. The WHO has continuously accepted Chinese propaganda and botched its investigation into the origins of the virus to appease the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden doesn’t seem interested in reforming the WHO, either. Until public pressure forced him to backtrack, he was content to rely on the WHO’s shoddy investigation. He takes the standard Democratic view that global institutions represent progress by their very existence (because they dilute the power of nation-states, and of this nation-state in particular). It’s a naive way to view the world, and it handicaps any effort to get to the bottom of how the pandemic started.
Biden is washing his hands of American leadership. A global body that professes to care about world health should not give authority to such regimes as Russia, Syria, or Belarus. Whether China is lying about the origins of COVID-19 — it almost certainly is — it is clear that it lied about human-to-human transmission, which the WHO parroted.
It was a mistake to rejoin the WHO with no guarantees of reform or accountability. To send the organization more taxpayer money heaps injury to the national fisc on top of insult to common sense.
Biden has chosen to return to the status quo that led to a pandemic that killed nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. He has chosen to prioritize a corrupt bureaucracy over global and national health.
