It’s time to be brutally honest about the World Health Organization (WHO)—the institution is a daily testament to the deadly failures of globalism.
The WHO was designed to keep humanity safe from disease outbreaks and epidemics, but it’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has only made the crisis worse. From the earliest days of the outbreak, the United Nations-backed organization blatantly parroted Chinese government propaganda, helping the communist regime spread misinformation at a tremendous cost in human lives.
On January 14, for instance, the WHO tweeted that the novel virus is not spreading between people, attributing the findings to the Chinese government. “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,” the group wrote.
Clearly, this was not the case—and the experts at the WHO should have known better than to believe China’s baseless claims, much less issue a statement that only could have been interpreted as a call to resist any efforts to prevent the spread of the new virus. At the time, Chinese authorities were already silencing doctors and researchers who tried to raise an alarm about the virus—which should have served as a clear clue that the regime should not be trusted. Doctors who posted information about the coronavirus on Chinese social media were confronted and reprimanded in late December, and at the start of January, the Hubei Provincial Health Commission ordered labs to stop testing virus samples. Both actions should have raised immediate red flags at the WHO.
But the list of deadly WHO errors doesn’t end there. When countries around the globe, including the United States, began implementing life-saving travel restrictions to curb the spread of the virus, the WHO actually urged governments not to take these common-sense measures.
“We reiterate our call to all countries not to impose restrictions that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned in February, adding that “such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”
Presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, a lifelong globalist, also has been eager to carry water for China, even deriding President Trump’s sensible travel restrictions on China in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak as “hysterical xenophobia.”
To make matters worse, the WHO went on to criticize travel restrictions that had already been put in place in the United States and other sensibly-run countries, asking authorities to lift them as soon as possible.
“Where such measures have been implemented, we urge that they are short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and are reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves,” Tedros declared.
Just like the WHO’s January tweet, this piece of advice was perfectly in line with Beijing’s propaganda. In early February, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry also criticized U.S. travel restrictions, arguing that the Trump administration had “inappropriately overreacted.” The regime has also routinely lashed out at President Trump’s rhetoric, desperate to distract the world from its poor handling of the outbreak.
For all of these reasons, the White House recently announced that the United State is halting its funding for the WHO, pending a thorough evaluation of the organization’s response to the coronavirus outbreak that is already underway.
“With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether America’s generosity has been put to the best use possible,” President Trump observed while announcing the freeze on America’s generous funding of the WHO, which amounts to nearly half a billion dollars per year. “As the organization’s leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability,” the President added, pointing out that “One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.”
It’s time to admit the unfortunate truth: globalist institutions have failed us in this pandemic. Bloated international bureaucracies such as the WHO have demonstrated their inability to fulfill their enormous mandates—and other countries around the world should follow our president’s lead and find a better use for their taxpayers’ resources.