#BTEditorial – Call Trump’s withdrawal of WHO funding what it is – an act of evil

It would be hard to dispute that before January of this year, most Americans had never heard of the World Health Organisation.

What is distressingly ironic is that the WHO, like the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the World Trade Organisation and an alphabet soup of multilateral institutions were created either at the explicit behest, suggestion, influence or active participation of the United States.

Indeed, the US is the WHO’s largest funder, indexed by relative wealth among nations. The US has played a critical role in the life of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) – the world’s oldest such health bureau, formed in 1902, and a model for the WHO in 1948.

The WHO inherited the legacy of international cooperation on public health and sanitation that goes back a full century before, right up to the short-lived League of Nations’ own health organisation.

In 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a law passed by the US Congress to donate the land upon which PAHO’s Washington headquarters was built.

International organizations are slow, fragile, brittle, cumbersome, meddlesome and irksome, to be sure. They are not superior to the nations that formed them, and must often bend with infuriating obedience to the will of its members.

As irritating as they often are by their very nature, they have nonetheless been no small bit-players in broadening the franchise of peace, security and better health and development for millions across the globe.

Then, as now, their imperfections are laid bare, for we live in a time of wars and rumours of war; a great pestilence stalks our lands; the gap between the wealthy and the poor ever widens.

And tiny island nations are like canaries in a mineshaft screaming at the world to bear witness to events on the frontline of climate change, pleading with nations to act in all deliberate haste to reverse the thermometer’s inexorable rise before it’s too late for the entire planet.

Of course, we will quarrel with these international institutions. We will strive to seek a better deal, gain greater access and have a larger voice in these affairs.

But even in their imperfection, they carry kernels of democratic governance, for each nation does have a voice.

It is these institutions that have made it possible for this island nation of barely more than a quarter-million souls to – in the words of the late United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan – punch above its weight in global affairs.

These institutions are not handout bodies. We receive from a pool of resources given by member nations, each indexed according to their ability to pay.

This requires greater understanding by all member states of the institutions’ limitations but also of their enormous importance in our daily lives, even when the great majority of those people whose lives have been improved or indeed preserved, may never see, know or quite grasp the roles they play.

We thus could not be more dismayed by the wanton act of malevolent realpolitik displayed by the current occupant of the White House in withdrawing US funding from the WHO.

Imagine a similar act of game-playing by an American president at any time since the 1950s. Imagine similar brinkmanship by America’s adversaries, with WHO as a pawn.

Let us be clear: the irksome organization the US seeks to defund has led the effort to eradicate smallpox and drive the global immunisation against polio. Its first major development was a system to share epidemiological information by the state-of-the-art communication system of the 1950s, telex.

Life has been lengthened or improved – or is no longer nasty, brutish and short – thanks to its battle against infectious diseases – especially malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and Ebola. Thank the WHO for its work to limit the spread of the original SARS coronavirus, MERS in the Middle East, H1N1, dengue fever and chikungunya in the last decade alone.

And for Caribbean nations among other middle-income and wealthier member states grappling with non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, WHO’s remit, and by extension that of its regional office, PAHO, have been invaluable promoters of better nutrition, food security, occupational health and safety, and mental health treatment.

On COVID-19, the record has been clearly established that the WHO warned the international community early and often of the likely impact of this new form of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The incredible uniformity of action by CARICOM member states to combat COVID-19 is a testimony to WHO’s effort to save lives, with PAHO being the regional tip of a global spear.

So for the next 60 to 90 days, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the medic and former Ethiopian health minister who became the first African to run this public health watchdog, will have to find the funds to distribute virus test kits, provide country and technical guidance – and lean more heavily on other donors for the WHO coronavirus response fund.

While Donald Trump cynically pulls funding from a leading agency in the middle of fighting a global pandemic, this merely creates an opportunity for the WHO’s second-biggest donor state and American nemesis, China, to fill the void.

Thus the effort to punish Beijing for its support for Dr Ghebreyesus’ candidacy is laid bare for the act of unrestrained state-sponsored evil that it is.