With the theory that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology now gaining widespread acceptance as a real possibility, the question must be raised again: What exactly is the purpose of rejoining the World Health Organization, which dismissed this theory with little consideration?
There are plenty of pundits and so-called journalists who waved off this possibility as a conspiracy theory, in part because it was popularized by Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton. To their discredit, partisanship blinded them, as former New York Times writer Donald McNeil has recently admitted. (The same can’t be said for my colleagues, whose prescient analysis can be read here, here, and here).
The World Health Organization can’t even fall back on that lame excuse. It states that it puts people’s health interests first, that it is independent, and its decisions are “fair, transparent and timely.” You could be forgiven if you don’t believe that, considering how the organization helped cover up the severity of the pandemic at the outset and uncritically boosted China’s claims, such as China saying it saw no evidence of human-to-human spread on the same day that an internal meeting of Chinese health officials said the opposite.
But it wasn’t enough for the WHO to make itself a Chinese puppet while ignoring warnings from Taiwan. The WHO subsequently launched a sham investigation, in coordination with China, that concluded that the lab leak hypothesis was “extremely unlikely.” Of the 313 pages in its report, the investigative team dedicated a grand total of four to dismissing the possibility.
The report is so unreliable that even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, himself a useful idiot for China throughout the pandemic, said that the investigation’s assessment of the lab leak theory was not “extensive enough.” So why are we going to keep funneling taxpayer dollars to the WHO?
The idea that we have to be a part of United Nations institutions to change them from the inside was clearly disproven by the WHO. The $3.5 billion that the U.S. has given to the organization since 2010 only bought us Chinese propaganda and continued cover-ups during the worst pandemic in a century.
This is not how we “restore our leadership on the world stage.” This is how we subsidize failing institutions, incentivizing them to continue failing because a naive Democratic president will foot the bill for their continued failure.
President Joe Biden’s foolish decision to rejoin the WHO will prove not only empty but also costly.
