During this global pandemic
the world, for the most part,
has looked to the World Health Organization for guidance.
The World Health Organization launches
a collaborative project to find a vaccine and treatments.
The World Health Organization warning
young people they're not invincible.
The World Health Organization officially announced
that this is a global pandemic.
Instead, it's found controversy.
Where President Trump does find fault in handling
the pandemic is the World Health Organization.
You know, right now, they're,
they're literally a pipe organ for China.
That's the way I view it.
He accused the body of being too trusting
of China's assertions that it had the virus under control.
They not only need to answer to the needs
of over 100 members states, but the whims
and politics of the countries and organizations
that donate the lion's share of their budget.
This is the story of how the WHO tried to please the world,
and ended up losing its biggest backer.
The World Health Organization was founded in 1948
by the also newly formed United Nations.
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Denmark, Greece,
Poland, Hungary, and many other nations
have benefited from WHO.
Headquartered in Geneva, they were tasked
to mandate and coordinate health policy.
The initial vision for the World Health Organization
was not only to make it an important agency focusing
on health issues, disease issues, and disease outbreaks,
but to try to create a form of international cooperation
and collaboration that would bind the nations together.
And in the coming decades,
the WHO has taken on a dizzying amount of missions,
from world-altering ones, like the eradication of smallpox,
and the identification of HIV,
to awareness campaigns,
like safe driving, suicide prevention,
and anti-smoking PSAs.
Well, there are several main roles.
So one is to, what they call it's a normative role,
which means it sets standards for medical matters
throughout the world.
And it has an important role in providing technical support
to low and middle income countries.
In order to tackle all of those initiatives,
the WHO has become an incredibly complex organization.
There are six regional offices around the world,
in Congo, Denmark, America,
India, Egypt, and the Philippines,
all of which report to the headquarters in Geneva.
Each of which has its own mode of functioning,
bureaucratic staff, and the like.
The balance of authority between the regional offices
and the headquarters in Geneva has always
been slightly problematic,
trying to get them all reading from the same page
when they have different regional constituencies.
And within those regional constituencies
are 150 country offices.
In order to run all of those offices
requires a great deal of money,
originally in the form of assessed contributions,
or dues, by the member states.
Assessments were determined by the overall GDP,
or economic strength of that particular country,
and its population.
There was some formula worked out.
And that formula worked for a while.
Member states paid their dues.
The WHO provided guidance
for health issues around the world.
But over the last three decades,
that amount of money declined,
and is now only about 20% of its overall budget.
Today, the WHO is mostly funded by voluntary contributions
with the United States being by far
the highest paying contributor followed by the organization
started by this guy.
If anything kills over 10 million people
in the next few decades it's most likely to be
a highly infectious virus, rather than a war.
And when and where the WHO gets its money from
influences so much about what it can do.
And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
can say through our extra budgetary funding
with so much invested in polio,
no one can tell us not to do that,
and that has made the WHO a very unbalanced
and complicated organization.
That unbalanced and complicated bureaucracy
has consistently been
one of the World Health Organization's biggest criticisms.
But they've also been criticized for how they've reacted
to the past two major epidemics before COVID-19.
We've now seen another outbreak of SARS.
Potentially, we've seen a cluster
and transmission of the SARS virus.
In 2003 was SARS.
The WHO was criticized for over-reacting to the disease,
which only had 774 known deaths,
but ended up costing East Asian countries
over $20 billion in lost GDP.
Hotels, tour agencies, and travel companies
are reported to have suffered huge losses
during the outbreak.
That led to an under-reaction in the response
to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014.
The big decision before them,
whether to label this worst ever Ebola outbreak a, quote,
"public health emergency of international concern."
It didn't get a grip on the situation.
It delayed in calling this public health emergency
of international concern.
The head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan,
she has experience, yeah, dealing with the outbreaks,
like bird flu, like SARS.
Shouldn't she have been handling this better?
And so it was a general mess, which led to many
investigations afterwards about the WHO's very slow
and inefficient and inadequate response.
So with the over-reaction to SARS
and under-reaction to Ebola, COVID-19 was a chance
for the WHO to finally get things right,
and initially, everyone seemed happy with their performance.
COVID-19 is a real threat.
It is a real threat to everyone on the planet.
It took the WHO one month to declare COVID-19
an international health emergency.
Compare that to the four months it took them to call
Ebola an international health emergency.
And Trump, who originally praised China
and the WHO's response to the pandemic--
So far, I think China's been
trying to be, or at least they seem to be trying to be
somewhat transparent with us.
He later turned on a dime,
blaming not only China for the pandemic,
but the WHO as well.
The WHO willingly took China's assurances
to face value, and they took it just at face value,
and defended the actions of the Chinese government,
even praising China for its so-called transparency.
I don't think so.
This was partially a response
to the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus'
constant praise of China during the pandemic.
I will praise China again and again,
because its actions actually helped in reducing
the spread of coronavirus to other countries.
China, as well as critics
of Trump's administration, say Trump shifted the blame
for domestic political reasons,
to divert attention from his catastrophic failure
to address the crisis in America,
whether it be from initially downplaying the virus--
In this big vast land of ours, this great country of ours,
we have 240 cases.
Most of those people are gonna be fine.
To touting unproven treatments--
A drug called hydroxychloroquine,
and it's shown very encouraging,
very, very encouraging early results.
I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be great.
All while the death rate in America
surpassed that of the rest of the world,
and even though there were accusations
that China has not been transparent
about their numbers of COVID-19,
Tedros and the WHO were presented
with an impossible decision.
This is international health diplomacy.
The WHO has no power of enforcement.
They cannot dispatch a team against a country's wishes.
They're dependent on data coming out of that country
with the presumption that countries will cooperate.
In no situation could the WHO
please both the U.S. and China,
and that resulted in Trump taking punitive action.
Today, I'm instructing my administration to halt
funding of the World Health Organization
while a review is conducted to assess
mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.
And remember that chart for who funds the WHO?
It's not just a huge loss for the organization,
but for poorer countries around the globe.
Every one of the essential functions in the WHO
would be immediately challenged and threatened,
if not stopped.
And while America has the CDC
to create their own guidelines and best practices--
Countries in Africa and other parts of the world
don't have those resources, and are desperately dependent
upon the WHO to provide equipment, information,
interventions, and now those will be seriously challenged,
if not stopped, completely.
So where does this leave
the World Health Organization right now?
Apparently, it's not up to them, but us.
Reminded of a quote by Larry Gostin,
who is one of the international health experts
that is very important within the WHO.
He has said, "the world has gotten
"the WHO that it deserves."
The world has created this organization,
with all its faults, flaws,
inconsistencies, and inefficiencies.
Can the world wake up?
Can this crisis force the world to say
we really do need a well-functioning
and truly neutral world health body
that will not be beholden to various financial interests
or political interests, and that if crisis can come,
not only disaster, but hope, and a new beginning,
will the world let it?