President Trump announced during a press briefing on Tuesday night that he will halt financial contributions to the World Health Organization while his administration conducts an investigation into the organization’s handling of the novel coronavirus.
Trump has already faced blowback for cutting off the WHO’s funding, but he is absolutely correct here. There is ample reason to believe that the WHO’s mishandling of COVID-19 left the world unnecessarily and unreasonably unprepared for this pandemic and that the organization’s continued parroting of Chinese propaganda is motivated by more than mere stupidity.
The WHO’s mistakes were not isolated, nor were they few. They began in January, when the WHO downplayed the risk of the coronavirus and foolishly repeated the Chinese Communist Party’s numbers as fact. The WHO then misled the public to believe that the coronavirus could not spread via human-to-human contact. Shortly thereafter, the WHO publicly refused to acknowledge scientific data from Taiwan simply because China does not view Taiwan as a legitimate country. After that, the organization railed against international travel bans, condemning and recommending against them as late as February 29 — an unjustifiable and shockingly late application of political correctness to salve the feelings of the mainland Chinese dictatorial regime that had supported and helped elect WHO’s current president.
Since then, WHO officials have been focused on appeasing China instead of holding the regime accountable for its dishonesty despite revelations from the U.S. intelligence community that revealed Xi Jinping’s repeated lies.
The question is: Why? Why is the WHO so willing to look the other way with regard to China’s faults, even though it is plainly obvious that the regime’s communist leaders bear primary responsibility for this pandemic? This is a question that demands an answer, and Trump is right to pursue it.
Critics of the WHO’s defunding have argued that Trump is leaving the world vulnerable to another global health disaster by crippling the WHO. This is a silly argument in the current circumstances. The WHO at full capacity did little to prevent the current crisis and in fact probably made it much worse. WHO has also quite recently paid lip service to the unscientific practices of traditional Chinese medicine — backing an unjustifiable and environmentally destructive industry that Beijing’s government supports. So now is as good a time as ever to question its value and efficacy.
The best thing we can do to prevent a similar health crisis from occurring in the future is to find out what went wrong and why. That will require an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, how it spread so uncontrollably, and why the global community was not promptly alerted to the threat. The answers to these questions lie in China, with a regime the WHO has been quick to defend.
The United States does not owe the WHO anything. We have almost single-handedly funded the organization for years, providing nearly 10 times the funding China has provided, and we now have evidence that we’re not getting an adequate return on our investment. The federal government’s primary responsibility is to its own citizens — not to the WHO. And if the WHO is undermining that primary responsibility, as recent events suggest, then it’s time to pull the plug.
