The WHO is long overdue a kick up the backside and this is t

The WHO is long overdue a kick up the backside and this is the right time to do it
Christopher Snowdon, 15 April 2020 • 11:08am

As someone who has been calling for the World Health Organisation to be reformed or replaced for years, Donald Trump’s decision to halt its funding gives me hope.

Those who are outraged by it should remember that the WHO accepts personal donations and dip their hands in their pocket. This applies especially to countries such as France, Spain, Italy, Finland and Ireland, whose combined contributions to the WHO’s general fund in 2018 amounted to less than five per cent of the USA’s.

In an ideal world, other big donors such as the UK would threaten to withhold funding until they are given an assurance that the Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, will resign and the agency will undergo a root and branch review. The WHO should promise to drop its obsessions with political correctness and the nanny state and return to its core mission of tackling infectious disease without fear or favour.

That may be too much to ask right now, but Trump’s decision has kept the spotlight on this rotten organisation and made reform more likely. As I wrote last week, there is no chance of the WHO mending its ways unless there is a credible threat of the money drying up.

No one is naive enough to think the president is motivated purely by a desire to see an international agency clean up its act. Trump’s mishandling of Covid-19 in January and February was in many respects worse than the WHO’s. The only thing he got right in that period was banning travel from China and Europe, a policy condemned by the WHO for creating ‘fear and stigma’.

Sometimes the right thing can happen for the wrong reasons. Whatever Trump’s motivations, the WHO is long overdue a kick up the backside and this is the right time to do it. The current pandemic will eventually subside and the public will go back to ignoring the agency. The time to act is when the eyes of the world are on it.

There is more method to Trump’s gunboat diplomacy than meets the eye. Although it has not been widely reported in Britain, the US Congressional Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote a letter to Dr Tedros just before Easter, expressing concern that ‘that the WHO is no longer serving the needs of the world and is instead taking its cues from China’. The committee has requested from the WHO  ‘all documents and communications regarding public health, including but not limited to Covid-19, novel coronavirus, or coronavirus, between the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party or the government of China between August 2019 and present.’ It has also asked for all documents and correspondence ‘regarding the total number of infected persons and deceased persons related to the current Covid-19 pandemic in China’ and for all relevant correspondence between the WHO and Taiwan.

The letter was sent a day after the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations’ Subcommittee On Multilateral Institutions wrote to Dr Tedros, telling him to expect an invitation to appear as a witness at a subcommittee hearing once the pandemic has died down ‘to examine the WHO’s response to novel coronavirus’ and to ‘examine questions about how American taxpayers will be funding this organization [the WHO] in the future’.

When Trump says he is halting funding ‘whilst a review is conducted to assess the WHO’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus’, we should take him seriously and literally. An enquiry is much needed, and the threat of losing fifteen per cent of his funding should give Dr Tedros an incentive to co-operate.

Christopher Snowdon is head of lifestyle economics at the Institute for Economic Affairs
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/15/long-overdue-kick-backside-right-time-do/
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