In 2009, footage of pigs being brutally slaughtered in Egypt
caused ripples of outrage across the world.
The Egyptian government had slaughtered every pig in the country
and justified it as part of their response to swine flu,
which the World Health Organization
had just officially declared a pandemic.
The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.
Across the world,
governments adopted measures in response to the WHO’s prediction
that two to four million people could potentially die of this new disease.
Borders were tightened, trade halted,
and billions of dollars were lost to economies around the world.
In the end, perhaps thanks to those measures,
only 18,500 people were confirmed to have died of swine flu.
There’s growing global anger against the World Health Organization
for reportedly making H1N1 pandemic bigger than it really was.
This led to many governments accusing the WHO
of having overstated the risk,
and causing them to shut down sectors of their economy unnecessarily
and spending vast sums of money on drugs and vaccines.
I’ll have you note that in the months of June and July,
we announced that there would be between 20 and 30 thousand dead.
Perhaps if we keep crying wolf, people will no longer believe
when someone says, “Be careful, this one is dangerous.”
In this case, it appears that the danger was vastly exaggerated.
But there is more to this story.
This is how American commercial interests,
Chinese government cover-ups,
and global geopolitics
have hollowed out the World Health Organization for decades,
damaging the world’s first line of defense against global pandemics,
and leaving it needlessly and catastrophically vulnerable
to political manipulation and new diseases like Covid-19.
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The WHO was founded by the UN after World War II
with a mission to fight disease,
identify global threats,
and improve access to health care across the globe.
Its virus division, headed by Dr Karol Rakza,
plots the movements of any outbreak,
identifies the virus, and sends out warnings to threatened areas.
The WHO was intended to be
the global health leader of the world
and has been ever since World War Two.
And they scored some major world-changing successes.
The World Health Organization,
a tremendous movement of world solidarity is now born.
Smallpox was a disease that killed around 300 million people
in the 21st century alone.
The WHO coordinated a global response,
creating a vaccine program that bridged the Cold War rivalry
between the US and the Soviet Union.
And by the 1980s, smallpox had been eradicated.
This is recognized as one of the great scientific achievements
of human history.
Smallpox eradication was achieved
because there was an engagement with politics
at a moment when there was an attempt to try and reach a bridge
through the USSR and US divide.
However, in the late 1970s,
when the WHO attempted to improve access to medicine around the world,
the organization's idealism came into opposition with
the financial interest of America’s pharmaceutical industry.
WHO adopted something called the Model List of Essential Drugs.
That was an initiative to allow
countries who are facing resource constraints
to make more rational choices about what drugs they would buy
for their health systems.
The US government saw that as an attack on market capitalism,
as a kind of hindrance to Big Pharma,
that they couldn’t market their products freely
in countries around the world.
The Reagan administration
instituted a policy of zero growth to the WHO’s budget,
which has essentially been frozen at 1990s levels,
even as inflation has risen
and the organization’s responsibilities have increased.
So there’s this freezing of the budget,
which then really constrained the WHO and what it could do.
It had a serious impact on the capacity of WHO.
This has led to an increased reliance on
voluntary donations by member states,
which, in turn, has left the organization
far more vulnerable to political pressure
and manipulation from those donor governments.
It has to rely on these donors,
the same countries that are squeezing the regular budget,
to provide funding on a voluntary basis.
And that way, donors can control what WHO does.
We need to have WHO doing things like outbreak response, surveillance,
monitoring of potentially serious emergencies.
So it does definitely have a direct line between
what happened in the 1980s and what we see now,
which is an organization that's chronically underfunded.
The Reagan administration pushed a zero growth policy
for the WHO’s budget,
which eventually froze states’ assessed contributions
at 1990s levels.
So with those contributions unable to go up,
the WHO has naturally needed more and more voluntary donations
as the years have gone by.
The WHO budget is about the size of one large United States hospital.
So with a global mandate, it has a pitiful budget.
It was in this condition,
stripped of funding and politically vulnerable,
that the WHO faced its first great crisis of the 21st century:
the SARS epidemic.
Staff at this giant medical facility have been told that within 24 hours,
their hospital will be entirely devoted to SARS patients.
The Chinese government covered up the early stages of this epidemic,
keeping the world in the dark about the new virus for five months
until a Beijing doctor defied the authorities,
revealing that many cases had been kept under wraps
by the Chinese state.
The handling of this crisis has been a disaster for the Chinese.
The virus threatens to spread across the country,
their credibility has been damaged, and so has their economy.
Despite the pressure it was under, it was the WHO
and in particular its then director general, Gro Brundtland,
that took bold steps to challenge the Chinese government cover-up
and bring the epidemic under control.
The WHO played a major role in exerting a lot of pressure on China
through the media, through the internet.
It was definitely that of an individual
who wasn’t worried about whether or not she’d be able to
have her term as director general continued,
and that was quite remarkable.
If the WHO had done the opposite,
not taking seriously something that potentially was very dangerous,
then I think I would rather be criticized as the director general
for having done more than having done too little.
Despite having no formal powers to ground planes,
the WHO called for travel restrictions.
These measures worked, and the death toll from the virus
proved to be far less than originally feared.
Due to an unprecedented global collaboration in public health,
the World Health Organization can say that the SARS outbreaks
have been contained.
This success led to
the implementation of the International Health Regulations.
Those events convinced countries that they really wanted to have
a mechanism for how do they coordinate,
what are the rules for sharing information,
what should countries do,
what should WHO do.
The International Health Regulations,
they provide binding authority
and basically tells countries, “If you find a novel outbreak,
you need to report it rapidly to the World Health Organization.”
But the WHO’s success was short-lived.
As the financial crisis hit in 2008,
the WHO’s budget was cut by 300 million.
You didn’t have the full staff in operation,
particularly in the area of communicable disease unit.
As the financial crisis surged in 2009, swine flu appeared in Mexico.
The organization reacted quickly, stepping up screenings at airports.
Countries purchased millions of vaccines as well as drugs
that would go unused, ultimately costing billions,
leading to political pushback from already cash-strapped governments.
Ebola is a deadly disease.
You must understand it.
This set the scene for the 2014 Ebola outbreak,
when, in the face of political pressure,
the WHO didn’t react quickly enough,
and the virus raged out of control across West Africa.
They didn’t appreciate the variety of social factors
and the way people’s mobility happens
to recognize how bad the spread was going to be.
In the end, over 11,000 people died,
and the U.S. military had to be deployed
to help contain the disease.
Multilaterally, it’s really been the World Bank
that stepped up in this regard,
and the World Bank has no confidence in the World Health Organization.
This was the moment where the WHO folded to pressure
which had been building since Reagan,
had increased through swine flu
and would come to express itself most publicly with China
and Covid-19.
There’s only one story the entire world is talking about,
the coronavirus, aka Covid-19, aka mambo number death.
The deadly coronavirus officially hitting the US.
A Washington State resident fell ill after returning from Wuhan, China.
The World Health Organization now says the pandemic is far from over
and that it may actually be speeding up.
The World Health Organization itself realized at the very end of 2019
that there was a novel virus circulating in Wuhan.
It found it out through social media and news reports,
and it took China several days to even confirm it.
By the time the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan in 2019,
China had become the WHO’s second contributor for assessed funds
after the United States.
Although China voluntarily donates very little.
The Chinese government attaches great importance to this new virus,
because the purpose of this government is to
put people’s lives and physical health at the top priority.
As the Chinese government denied
and covered up the existence of the new virus and its victims...
Early whistleblowers were silenced.
People were angry about a government cover up.
No hospital beds! No medicine!
All the news on CCTV is fake!
the WHO seemed unwilling to challenge it.
A PBS
obtained through the Associated Press’s investigative team
revealing concerns about this amongst WHO employees.
This is exactly the same scenario,
endlessly trying to get updates from China.
Those concerns are not something they ever aired publicly.
And instead they basically deferred to China.
They said, “China says that there is this number of cases.”
The very same day,
a WHO spokesperson went on Chinese television
to echo what Chinese authorities had told them.
It appears that the cases have stopped,
new cases have stopped after the market was temporarily closed.
WHO should answer Taiwan CDC’s email.
Chuang Yin-Ching, an epidemiologist
who leads the Taiwanese Center for Disease Control,
noted that after returning from Wuhan in January 2020,
his office sent an email to the WHO
stressing the possibility of human-to-human transmission.
That email went unanswered.
You expect them to do so much, and then it doesn’t perform well
because it doesn’t have enough resources,
and then you blame it and freeze the resources even more.
This was not the first time that experts have pointed to
the WHO’s internal politics and influences
leaving it open to pressure from the Chinese government.
Director General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros,
his candidacy in 2017 was,
by some reports, largely bolstered by Chinese inducements.
The great irony here is that
the WHO’s vulnerability to Chinese influence
stems directly from the Reagan administration’s
push to cut its funding back in the 1980s
And before that for two terms was Margaret Chan,
who represented the People’s Republic in that body.
From the start of this pandemic,
the World Health Organization has done shockingly little
to stop the virus from spreading around the world.
My frustrations with the World Health Organization continue.
I’m instructing my administration
to halt funding of the World Health Organization.
This failure to challenge the Chinese government
played right into the hands of hawks in the US,
who immediately weaponized the narrative
as part of their ongoing trade and culture war with China
and, of course, to deflect attention from their own glaring failures
in containing Covid-19.
The big scheme of things
when we are talking about $60 trillion with Covid-19,
even if there are some excessive responses from time to time,
it's probably worth it.
Clearly, however, we do need a more vigorous,
a very powerful and authoritative WHO down the road.
The WHO is squeezed between budget cuts and geopolitical rivalries,
blamed for shutting down economies
if they react too vigorously to emerging pandemics
and for excess deaths if they react too slowly.
I think there is a general commitment to fix the system this time.
Hopefully, in the post-pandemic period,
we’ll not let that opportunity pass us by.
I often say that the world has the WHO it deserves
because it’s never funded it,
it’s never given it the powers,
and it’s never given it the political backing.
So perhaps Covid-19 will lead to an opportunity to strengthen WHO,
but that remains to be seen.