But for these people, the WHO hierarchy, charged with global human health, it’s politics above lives.
The US is the major donor to the WHO, and I’m wondering why they didn’t make more of a noise. Second largest donor is Bill Gates’ Foundation. Microsoft still has major business in China, so it’s not too much of a stretch to think that might play a part in Bill's not supporting Taiwan. By the way, Taiwan had observer status until recently, to the defenestration is a new thing. Thanks to the paranoia of Xi Jinping.
And now the WHO wants us to buy into a grand global anti-pandemic strategy, run, of course, by them. I say, "thanks, but no thanks". There’s plenty everyone could have done better. Of course we should share best practice. But to imagine that countries can “harmonise” policies against the next pandemic, then you haven’t been paying attention to how it all went down in this one. There’s no point in pushing for stuff that’s never going to happen. The localised reactions worked best. Not one-size-fits-all, per what the WHO imagine we can do.
Matt Ridley is a thoughtful commentator on much in the public scientific sphere. Here he says it well:
Though some of the measures make sense, such as more sharing of vaccines with other countries, the plan skates around WHO’s errors during the Covid pandemic. It ignored Taiwan’s early alarm call, praised the Chinese government for its transparency at a time when it was denying human-to-human transmission and punishing whistleblowers, delayed declaring a health emergency, flip-flopped on masks and lockdowns and mounted a farcical Potemkin investigation into the origin of the virus. Added to its poor performance in the 2014 ebola outbreak, when for months WHO resisted calls from doctors and NGOs to declare an emergency to avoid offending member governments, this track record does not inspire confidence. [More]
Matt wrote a book with co-author, the epidemiologist Alina Chan, about the search for the source of the Covid virus. I’ve read it, and thanks mainly to Ridley, it’s a page-turner. Viral. The search for the origin of Covid-19
