The assault on the WHO is just another Trump tantrum:
More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.
A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.
The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s charge that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.AD
[…]
In addition to working at WHO, on assignments first reported Saturday by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, CDC officials are often members of its many advisory groups. The emergency committee advising the organization on whether to declare “a public health emergency of international concern” during deliberations in mid to late January included Martin Centron, director for CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine.
When China eventually agreed to let a joint WHO mission into the country in mid-February, it included two U.S. scientists among 25 national and international experts from eight countries, although the Americans were not permitted to visit the “core area” in Wuhan.
From the beginning of the outbreak, CDC officials were tracking the disease and consulting with WHO counterparts. A team led by Ray Arthur, director of the Global Disease Detection Operations Center at CDC, compiles a daily summary about infectious disease events and outbreaks, categorized by level of urgency, that is sent to agency officials.
Arthur, according to a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, has participated in the CDC daily “incident management” calls, discussing information he learned from WHO officials.
Information is passed up the chain of command from CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services in daily reports and telephone discussions, this official said.
Any information of a sensitive nature about the growing outbreak was and continues to be shared by CDC officials with other U.S. officials in a secure facility located behind the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center at its Atlanta headquarters.
In the early days of the virus response, those officials included HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Information about what the WHO was planning to do or announce was often shared days in advance, the CDC official said.
Trump defunding the WHO in the middle of the pandemic is perfectly predictable. He withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and the iran Nuclear Deal as well because he simply doesn’t know how to do anything but say his predecessors and foreigners have done everything wrong so he can show he’s doing something by reversing it.
He really is the blowhard at the end of the bar complaining that all the powers-that-be don’t have a clue who has suddenly found himself with the power himself. He’s just a whiner, not a leader so this is the only thing he can think of to do — destroy everything that went before, blame others for his failures , dance as fast as he can and just try to get through each day.
American carnage is his legacy.
*By the way, I’m sure the WHO deserves to be scrutinized and critiqued like any other institution. But defunding it in the middle of the pandemic is sheer lunacy.