There are riots in the streets and the president is fanning the flames with his adolescent tough guy fantasy. Yesterday, he encouraged his MAGAts to take to the streets explaining that “they love the black people.”
This is what the reporters were asking about:
Basically he’s calling for a clash between “his” people and those protesting police violence. In front of the White House.
I just don’t know what to say.
Meanwhile, we now have more than 103,000 Americans dead in the last three months. And yesterday, Trump announced that he wants to kill many more around the world:
Experts in health policy are contending with the real possibility that the United States will pull away from the World Health Organization (WHO), fracturing a relationship that began in the wake of the Second World War.
They say that the repercussions could range from a resurgence of polio and malaria, to barriers in the flow of information on COVID-19. Scientific partnerships around the world would also be damaged, and the United States could lose influence over global health initiatives, including those to distribute drugs and vaccines for the new coronavirus as they become available, say researchers.
A fissure between the US and the international health agency opened further last week, when US President Donald Trump tweeted a letter to WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, threatening to make permanent the US freeze on WHO funding that began in April, unless the organization “can actually demonstrate independence from China” within 30 days. He added that he will reconsider the United States’ membership of the organization. “I don’t think this is an idle threat,” says Kelley Lee, a global health-policy researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
Proposals for new US-led initiatives for pandemic preparedness abroad do little to quell researchers’ concerns. Some say these efforts might even add incoherence to the world’s response to COVID-19, and global health more generally, if they’re not connected to a fully-funded WHO. “It’s surreal to even be having this conversation, since it’s so hard to get one’s head around the massive implications,” says Rebecca Katz, director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
The acrimony is poorly timed, given the need for international coordination and cooperation to contend with the coronavirus. “In this pandemic, people have said we’re building the plane while flying,” Katz says. “This proposal is like removing the windows while the plane is mid-air.”
Trump’s letter, which he tweeted on 18 May, alleges that the WHO intentionally ignored reports that COVID-19 was spreading between people in Wuhan, China, in December. “I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests,” he wrote. A few of Trump’s points were immediately debunked. For example, he claimed that the medical journal The Lancet had published on the new coronavirus in December. The next day, the journal issued a statement calling the claim factually incorrect because their first reports on COVID-19 were published on 24 January. The journal also refuted other allegations in the letter, concluding that the claims are “damaging to efforts to strengthen international collaboration to control this pandemic.”
Tedros has reiterated his commitment to a comprehensive and independent evaluation of the WHO’s response to COVID-19, and an assessment of the organization’s operations in the first part of 2020 is already public. But when reporters asked Tedros about additional, immediate investigations in response to Trump’s allegations at a WHO press briefing, he said, “Right now, the most important thing is fighting the fire, saving lives.”
Trump does not need Congressional approval to withhold funds from the WHO, and global health researchers say the gap left by the US is a big deal. Last year, the US government gave the WHO roughly US$450 million. Nearly 75% of that was voluntary, and the other quarter was mandatory — a sort of membership fee expected from the 194 member countries, adjusted by the size of their economies and populations. The United States is the biggest donor, representing about 15% of the WHO budget. So far this year, it has paid about one-quarter — $34 million — of its membership dues, according to a WHO spokesperson. Voluntary funds are more complicated because a large portion were paid last year, however the spokesperson says that the freeze has put a hold on new agreements, meaning that the full-blown effects of the decision will be felt in 2021.
The US government provides 27% of the WHO’s budget for polio eradication; 19% of its budget for tackling tuberculosis, HIV, malaria and vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles; and 23% of its budget for emergency health operations. If these initiatives shrink, researchers say, death and suffering will surge. David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says this will also amount to squandered investment for the United States, particularly for polio. Gains won through vaccination campaigns that cost hundreds of millions of dollars would be lost, he says.
He does not care. And neither do his followers who have all turned into sadists in love with pain and violence. Maybe they were always this bad but I think Trump has finally, completely, unleashed the beast.