US President Donald Trump’s suspension of his country’s annual $400m contribution to the UN’s Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) — about 15% of the total budget — in the middle of a global pandemic that has already infected 2.3-million people and killed about 161,000, was as recklessly outrageous as it was utterly predictable. Trump’s action was akin to a pyromaniac fireman pouring petrol on a giant inferno.
By cutting US funding, not only will the country with the largest number of deaths from the pandemic (about 39,000 on Sunday) as well as the highest cases (about 735,000) not have access to the WHO’s expertise at this critical juncture, but these cuts will also negatively affect the organisation’s ability to combat other diseases such as HIV/Aids, Ebola and cancer.
Trump accused the WHO of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the Covid-19 pandemic and of promoting “Chinese disinformation”.
The global response to Trump’s actions criticised his cuts as detrimental to efforts to manage the crisis. The US president had, at first, dismissed the virus as a “hoax” and compared fatalities from it to those of the flu. As the US death toll mounted and the woeful lack of preparedness of the world’s richest country was embarrassingly laid bare, Trump sought to blame his own failures on the Barack Obama administration and on incompetent state governors.
When this approach did not work he soon turned his ire on foreign foes. The US president repeatedly depicted Covid-19 as “the Chinese virus”, before turning on the UN. Some US citizens have in the past complained that black UN helicopters have been flying around their country in a bid to create a “world government”. It is this deep well of mistrust of the world body from which Trump is now drinking.
The 194-member WHO was established in 1948 and remains indispensable to the solution of this crisis. Its annual budget of $2.7bn has not risen in real terms for four decades, representing real value for money.
The WHO’s Ethiopian director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has energetically and eloquently sought to inform the world about the virus. Though delaying calling the spread of the virus a pandemic until March, the WHO did react fairly timeously to this crisis and has co-ordinated efforts on diagnostics, drugs, vaccine research and purchasing personal protective equipment, as well as helping countries share information on the pandemic. The organisation has prioritised assistance to poorer countries with weak health systems. With Africa’s external debt standing at about 60% of GDP, these countries will need all the help they can get to tackle the pandemic.
However, Tedros has not always displayed political astuteness. The WHO chief showed political naiveté in effusively praising China’s “transparency” (despite Beijing’s reported six-day delay in warning the public about the virus) and repeatedly urged the globe to adopt China’s response to the crisis as a model. The Ethiopian technocrat should have anticipated the potential backlash his words would eventually trigger from Washington. Trump himself had hypocritically earlier backed Beijing’s co-operation with the WHO and praised China’s handling of the crisis.
Beijing had informed the WHO about the virus within a fortnight, though it delayed a visit by WHO officials to Wuhan. Tedros was thus justified in visiting President Xi Jinping to gain access for his staff.
Part of Washington’s pro-China criticism is also based on reports that the WHO failed to provide Taiwan with crucial information at the beginning of this crisis. But despite US criticisms of the UN body’s supposed Sinophilia the WHO was, for decades, ironically criticised by many countries for being an American poodle.
• Prof Adebajo is director of the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation.
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