Inside the Trump Administration's Decision to Leave the World Health Organization - Pro... - 0 views
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shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jun 20
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The United States is the largest donor among the WHO’s 194 member states, giving about $450 million last year. The WHO said the U.S. cut in funding would affect childhood immunizations, polio eradication and other initiatives in some of the most vulnerable parts of the world
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The administration plans to fill the void left by its withdrawal with direct aid to foreign countries, creating a new entity based in the State Department to lead the response to outbreaks, according to interviews and a proposal prepared by the department. The U.S. will spend about $20 billion this year on global public health. (About $9 billion of that is emergency aid for COVID response.) But the senior administration official conceded that important activities led by the WHO, including vaccination initiatives, need to continue. It is not yet clear what will happen to those programs when American funding and participation end, the official acknowledged.
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The new directive will require officials to divert their attention from pandemic response in order to review a list of their WHO-related activities and try to justify them on national security and public health safety grounds
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The flu vaccine that Americans receive at drugstores and doctors’ offices is based on work that the CDC and Food and Drug Administration conduct through the WHO
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Since 2004, the U.S. has helped build a global network of WHO flu centers, buying lab equipment and training scientists. The centers in more than 100 countries collect samples from sick people, isolate the viruses and search for any new viruses that could cause an epidemic or pandemic. The CDC houses one of five WHO Collaborating Centers that collect these virus samples, sequence the viral RNA and analyze reams of data on flu cases around the world, while the FDA runs one of the four WHO regulatory labs that help vaccine makers determine the correct amount of antigen, which triggers the immune response, to include in vaccines.
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The Trump administration’s plan to bypass the WHO and address global health problems directly with foreign governments will run into trouble in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and other regions where Americans encounter hostility or have difficulty operating
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The onslaught of the coronavirus has hurt immunization activities worldwide, causing a rise in measles and other diseases.
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fear that the U.S. decision will endanger a WHO-led program that has come tantalizingly close to the eradication of polio
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The uncertainty has caused concern in the pharmaceutical industry as well as the government, officials said. The CDC could lose access to the data and virus samples that protects Americans from potentially deadly strains of flu from around the world.
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“No one is looking for U.S.-based alternatives to WHO,” he said. “Dead on arrival. There is no way they are going to be supported or even accepted.”
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The WHO has a history of bringing together ideological rivals. William Foege, a CDC director under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, credits the global agency for uniting American scientists and their counterparts from the Soviet Union during the Cold War to eradicate smallpox in a little more than a decade.
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“It’s not a failed bureaucracy,” said Foege, who worked on the international fight against smallpox. “If you go there and see all they do every year, and they have a budget for the entire world that’s smaller than many medical centers in this country.”
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“In general, the WHO is deferential to member states,” Kolker said. “Yes, it should have been more aggressive in response to Chinese obstruction. Tedros surely realizes the public statements were too deferential to China. But the organization is not dominated by China. Its weaknesses reflect the challenges we have long faced in international collaboration on public health.”
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“There’s one country that’s desperate for the United States to leave the WHO, and that’s China,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said at a hearing Thursday of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “They are going to fill this vacuum. They are going to put in the money that we have withdrawn, and even if we try to rejoin in 2021, it’s going to be under fundamentally different terms because China will be much more influential because of our even temporary absence from it.”