Trump’s WHO attacks: Fair criticism or scapegoating?

President Trump last week called for the U.S. to withhold funding for the World Health Organization over what he claimed were missteps that perpetuated the coronavirus pandemic. “The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain and share information in a timely and transparent fashion,” Trump said.

The WHO’s director-general defended the agency in response to Trump’s criticism. “This is a time for all of us to be united,” he said. “When we are divided, the virus exposes the cracks between us.”Trump isn’t alone in critiquing the WHO’s handling of coronavirus. Infectious disease experts have been critical of the agency’s failure to challenge China’s optimistic claims about the virus, most crucially doubting evidence from Taiwan in mid-January that it could be transmitted from human to human.

The choice to defund the WHO has received especially pointed criticism. For all its flaws, the WHO still plays a critical role in protecting the world from a long list of dangerous health risks. Denying the agency a major source of funding will cause unnecessary deaths, some experts say.Trump didn’t provide details on how the funding freeze would be carried out. There’s some question about whether it’s within his authority to do so, since the money is appropriated by Congress.

Trump is attacking the WHO because he can’t be as aggressive with China“Trump is correct that the WHO has failed to perform one of its most important functions: Serving as the world’s early-warning system for new infectious diseases. But his anger is misdirected. It is China that is still not being fully transparent about the outbreak. The problem is that Trump has fewer options and less leverage with China.

The WHO is the perfect kind of scapegoat for the Trump era“The WHO ticks all the boxes of a perfect scapegoat. Big multilateral bureaucracy based in Switzerland? Check. Friendly to China? Double check. Receives large U.S. donations? Yep. Even if Trump missed all of those signs, which he never would, Republican Senators have been vigorously pointing them out.” — Therese Raphael, Bloomberg

Fair!

Fair

Scapegoating for his administrations failure to react promptly.

Both

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The World Health Organization — under attack by Trump — was targeted by conservatives in 1948, tooOpponents charged that the United States would wind up paying a disproportionate share of the WHO’s budget and suspected the Soviet Union's involvement in the organization You should be as well. You numbers are just as fake.
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