Today, Explained - Blame WHO?

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

President Trump would like to. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. According to new data from disease modelers at Columbia University, the country could have saved 36,000 lives if we had just locked down one week earlier. Now, if you were to ask the president

why he didn't ask that people stay in place sooner, he might blame China and the World Health Organization for not being clear enough about the dangers of the coronavirus early on. The president's been going at China since he was campaigning, nothing new there, but the WHO beef is sort of fresh. It's sort of specific to this pandemic. It started with some characteristic blame game. Then it escalated to freezing funding. And this week, President Trump threatened to withdraw the United States from the organization altogether if it doesn't embrace reforms. Alex Ward, you've been covering this beef for Vox.

Where does it begin? It goes back really to the start of the coronavirus. China says the number of people infected by a mysterious respiratory virus has more than tripled over the weekend. There are now 218 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus virus. Trump was actually pretty happy with the World Health Organization and even China in the way that they were handling the early days. He praised the response. I think he's doing it very professionally.

I know this. President Xi loves the people of China. He loves his country. And he's doing a very good job with a very, very tough situation. And then, over time, Trump did not do too great with his coronavirus response, and he was looking for a scapegoat. And there were two pretty easy targets out there, the same things that he had just been praising, China and the World Health Organization. They seem to be very China-centric. They called it wrong. They called it wrong. They really,

they missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known. And they should have known. And they probably did know. So we'll be looking into that very carefully. Early on, it became clear that there was an outbreak happening in Wuhan, what is well regarded as the origination point of the coronavirus. The WHO was asking, hey, can we send some people into the city to observe what's happening? Can we offer some assistance? And China said no. And the WHO did not necessarily press that much. There was even times where you had China saying that there was no evidence of human to human transmission of the disease. And the WHO boosted that message by tweeting this out and saying there's no human to human transmission. And even further, you had the WHO waiting quite some time

before it actually called the coronavirus something worth worrying about. Make no mistake, this is, though, an emergency in China. But it has not yet become a global health emergency. It was January 30th that the WHO called it basically an issue of global concern. And that was, you know, months after we already knew that something was amiss. And there's even some reporting, and this is from German newspapers, but there's some reporting that Chinese officials had asked the WHO to not call it a pandemic and to effectively to blame China for what was happening.

And the WHO held off. They didn't actually call it a global pandemic until March. So throughout this entire time, per the Trump administration's argument, and there is an air of truth to this. This entire time, the world was not so warned by the premier global health body about what was happening. Granted, we could see what was going on, but what's important to note is that the WHO, in many people's minds, not just Trump's, did pretty much fail in the early parts of this outbreak. The president loves to push blame on any number of entities, but you're saying here he has some credibility.

In this case, yes. I mean, there's no question that the WHO did not act 100% great in this case. Obviously, there's always some uncertainty with any kind of pandemic, and so you give a little bit of leeway. But the major claim here is that the WHO was so worried about angering China that it kind of delayed its global response, that it did not push hard enough against China to force, effectively, some health inspectors in to see what was going on. And then you have the WHO boosting wrong information about the disease. So there's no question that the WHO kind of failed early on, made some pretty key missteps. It has since done quite well. But in those early stages, those critical early stages, the WHO, I think, arguably fell down on the job. And Trump does have a point when he makes that case.

So how does this go from the president just, you know, blasting the WHO in tweets or in press conferences to something more concrete? In April, Trump makes this pretty dramatic announcement. Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. A very quick little context here. The United States is the number one funder for the World Health Organization. There's two ways of funding. One is they basically take a percentage of how big a country's economy is, so the U.S. maxes out. But the vast majority of the funding

that goes to the WHO is voluntary. And the U.S. is also the biggest contributor in that as well. So this would take a massive chunk out of the WHO's roughly $5 billion budget, a pretty small budget considering it being a global body. But any sort of freeze from the United States would massively hurt this institution and would, especially during a time of pandemic, would make it extremely hard for this organization to do its job and try to save lives as best as it can.

So any announcement of any kind saying, not only would the U.S. cut funding, which would hurt it anyway, but effectively freeze it, you know, sent out alarm bells throughout the world. How did the world react? Not well. You had, you know, the WHO basically say, We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a hold in funding to the World Health Organization. You had tons of American allies say that this was an abdication of American leadership and moral leadership.

Tawnish the Simon Coveney joined a chorus of opposition on Twitter, calling the move an indefensible decision. And then you had China say, you know, not say this directly, but basically go, oh, there's a vacuum that we get to fill here. And so China pledged more money, about $30 million plus to the WHO, and then only recently said that they would contribute even $2 billion more to the global fight against the coronavirus. Granted, that's also part of their own campaign to not look so bad for being the country that, you know, where the disease developed. But still, one of China's larger projects is to replace or at least, you know, have more influence in the global institutions that the United States helped build up after

World War II. And so this is kind of a gift to China to have the United States pull back purposefully so China can just step right on it. What happens after Trump freezes the funding and China steps up? Well, the United States still conducts its review and there was no transparency to what that review looked like. But what we had was Trump on Monday put out a letter to the chief of the WHO in which he lays out a litany of his grievances against the organization's handling of the early days of the coronavirus, saying that it ignored early warnings, that it didn't push China hard enough, all the things that we talked about, and then said

if the WHO does not reform in 30 days, then the United States will cut all of its funding to the World Health Organization. More with Alex after a quick break. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-m-p.com slash explained,

cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Today, today explained. Alex, before we get into what reforms the president might want the World Health Organization to implement, what exactly does the World Health Organization do? Are you asking me who are you? Who, who, who, who? I really want to know. Who, who? Who, who?

So it is a UN body that was founded in 1948, and its basic job is to coordinate global health responses. In its first assembly, July 1948, Director General Dr. Chisholm declared that this organization was physically prepared to raise the health level of all people and to forever destroy the human afflictions of malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, and syphilis. The kind of two main missions that it has is intelligence gathering, so figuring out where the new pandemics are or, you know, where new big diseases are coming from,

and to help a country or a certain set of countries with their individual sovereign responses. The World Health Organization will make full use of every existing means, education, prevention, cure. All peoples of every race and belief will be helped by doctors from all races and nations. A tremendous movement of world solidarity is now born. And the WHO has been a really important body for the world. So, for example, it started to focus on polio, and within 20-ish, 30 years, polio was no longer a thing. And that's because the WHO invested tons of resources into eradicating that.

When Ebola hit, although the WHO did fall on the job there to a certain extent, it did help countries that needed hospital beds and training and all kinds of things to deal with their responses. And there's a misconception about what the WHO does, which is like the second there's a pandemic, they have swarms of like doctors and almost like medical police ready to head in and just deal with a certain disease. But that's not what it does. It's really just kind of an assistance body. And it can't do all those things that many perceive it to do because it's a relatively poor organization. For, you know, a global body to have about an operating budget of $5 billion is really, really low. That's not so much that it can actually coordinate, you know, this massive sort of global response when called upon. So it really relies on its regional offices or offices in Latin America and Europe and Africa and elsewhere that are

semi-autonomous and try to kind of focus on their regions. And then there are about 150 or so sort of individual offices that focus even more on their targeted areas. So it's kind of, if you think about it, a forward-deployed medical intelligence organization. Is it just the United States calling for reforms or are other countries joining us? More of the world's attentions focus on China's fault in this, which is almost a universal truth at this point that China bungled this, was late, lied about it,

tried to suppress information. We know this to be true. Europe's response to China has been somewhat more tepid, but still critical. Australia has gone almost full in against China. Origins of the virus was in China, and China remains responsible for the outbreak. But the one taking this further has really been America. There's tons of countries that think the WHO could work better if it reformed. But in this specific case, the only country really in a major way going after that body is the United States. And what is President Trump proposing? What are the reforms he would like to see?

We don't know. Aww. I talked to the State Department. They referred me to the White House. I asked the White House. They have not gotten back to me. And this has been a couple days now. Trump says that the White House and the WHO are in talks about what these reforms look like.

But there's no specifics. Trump wants the WHO to be less China-friendly. But what that means, does that mean kicking China out, giving it less power, you know, removing China from the executive body? Like, I don't know what that means. But China is a powerful member of the WHO. And so to believe that China would be okay with these reforms, that the WHO could change the way it's operated for decades, all within 30 days,

and all without sort of specific guidelines, at least that the public knows about, is really hard to believe. And so my suspicion is this is somewhat of a cover. This is a way for the United States to say, we totally tried to work with the WHO. We gave them our thoughts. We gave them some time.

But in the end, you know, they didn't abide. So we're finally able to remove the millions and up to about a billion dollars that we give the body. Well, since he isn't getting into specifics, can we do it for him? Talk about reforms? It seems like the WHO could clearly use a little more authority in these pandemic, epidemic situations. Is that a reform the president could get behind? It doesn't seem like his scene.

It's possible, but Sean, have you heard of the World Trade Organization? Yeah, sure. Okay, so one of the reforms that are sort of out there for the World Health Organization is to follow kind of the World Trade Organization's model. And here's that model, which is that the world's countries gave up just a little bit of their sovereignty to the World Trade Organization to adjudicate trade matters. So one of the reforms with the WHO is that maybe these countries could give up a little of their sovereignty when there is a global crisis like this, in the sense that the WHO has more money, more resources, more stuff, more medical officers, and that when something hits, let's say, China and the United States and Denmark and Djibouti, wherever it could be, that the WHO sends this kind of like

special forces medical team into that country, starts getting data, maybe is able to help quash it right away with local authorities, and that will help. But that's hard for the WHO to do when, again, it is mostly an intelligence and assistance organization with a relatively small budget. Another reform would be to lower or to change the executive decision making authorities within the body so that they're less political. So, right, having China as part of that body and a major part of that body makes it so if another pandemic were to grow in China, then we might have a replay of this scenario. So maybe it's somewhat related to reform number one, but at the end of the day, this is about allowing the WHO to be a more technocratic organization that just quickly goes, okay, we see a crisis, here are the steps, here's the playbook, and there's

very minimal political interference. That's sort of reform number two. And then three, and it's just more kind of general, is give the WHO more money. Let it have more power overall. You don't have to change necessarily the relationship with countries, but if it had a doubled budget or a quadrupled budget and more stuff and more experts, then they'd have a better chance of getting more offices around the world, finding outbreaks early before they happen, getting, you know, more intelligence and more resources to help countries. That would, in theory, help further responses. Okay, so three major reforms out there. One, countries give up a little more sovereignty. Two, change how executive decision-making works

so it's less political. Three, give the WHO way more money. Like, these all sound great, but I mean, there's no way they could pull off these huge structural reforms in the middle of a global crisis, is there? Of course not. It's got its hands full. I mean, the only time I think people at that organization take a break is when they're talking to press. Otherwise, they're working nonstop on trying to figure out still some scientific, you know, stuff about the disease itself, helping all the countries around the world deal with this crisis, offering them tests and assistance and hospital care and whatever it may be. And their unique locations,

whatever they require, the WHO is there to help. But the last thing it needs is not only just a funding cut, but a massive distraction like this when the leaders of the WHO need all their time and attention to help actually end the pandemic. So do you think the president

will go through with it, though? Will he kneecap the WHO? I would bet he would. I know Trump makes a lot of empty threats and, you know, backs off because someone told him it's a bad idea and it's possible he will. But my money is that he'll do it. And the reason is it's an election year. And so for him to say it's their fault, not my fault helps too. It's just who he is. He does not like taking the blame for anything. I think we know it's clear that, not my fault, helps. Two, it's just who he is. He does not like taking the blame for anything. I think we know it's clear that America's specific response to the coronavirus has been extremely faulty, to put it mildly, and that is on the president.

I believe there was an episode that you guys did about this exact thing. Just Tuesday. And frankly, if there's one constant in Trump's foreign policy, it has been extremely critical of global governance. Congress does have a say in this, though, because Congress does appropriate funds. And so there's a good chance that a lot of people in Congress, you know, even the Republican-led

Senate might go, this is a step too far, Mr. President, and will try to block it or moderate his stance. And that may cause him to retrench. But for the most part, I mean, one could imagine Trump going, I want the money gone, passing an executive order or something. Or some Trump ally in government says, all right, we're just going to take that money out and see if Congress will mount some sort of effort to block it. That's possible. So it's not as simple as Trump turning the spigot on and off, but it will cause a massive fight either way. And that would be an extreme blow to the WHO at a time when billions of people rely on its assistance and when, frankly, hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake. Alex Ward is one of the hosts of Vox's Worldly podcast. Their episodes drop on Thursdays. Today's is all about medical populism, how hydroxychloroquine became a hit in the US,

Brazil, France, and elsewhere. Check it out wherever you listen. Worldly. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.