The WHO: Clarifying the Blame Game

The president and his Trump Party desperately want to shift all blame for their incompetence and long-standing anti-government ideology for the botched US response to the coronavirus pandemic. Part of the conservative-populist blame game is directed to, among other miscreants, the Chinese government, president Obama, the impeachment, democrats, and the World Health Organization (WHO). It helps to keep things in context and informed by facts and sound reasoning instead of partisan self-serving lies and bogus reasoning.

The WHO is dedicated to disseminating information about science-based truth about diseases and health conditions that plague the human condition. It is a critically important source of global information about epidemics. Its mission is not to allow politics to derail or dilute science that may be inconvenient for any political ideology, leader, tyrant, blowhard or movement. The WHO says this about its mission: “WHO works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. Our goal is to ensure that a billion more people have universal health coverage, to protect a billion more people from health emergencies, and provide a further billion people with better health and well-being.”

The US supports WHO to the tune of about $500 million/year, but the US legal obligation by treaty is closer to about $115 million. The president attacks the WHO as “very China-centric.” That has nothing to do with the failures of the president and his Trump Party enablers. The US was informed early on about the extreme seriousness of what was coming.

WHO’s China centricity 

The best propaganda often or usually contains a kernel of truth. That kernel is what demagogues, tyrants and kleptocrats always look for as something to exploit in their endless stream of dark free speech.

Unfortunately, the WHO has allowed Chinese and some other non-science to pass as science. Politics trumped science and that egregious mistake needs to be reversed. In the case of China’s traditional Chinese medicine, which is unproven ‘alternative’ medical treatments, the WHO stated that the goal of WHO policy “is to promote the safe and effective use of traditional medicine by regulating, researching and integrating traditional medicine products, practitioners and practice into health systems, where appropriate.”

An astoundingly anti-science article in Nature in 2018 approved of WHO quackery and wrote this lunacy about treatment of diabetes,

“The patient, who would probably be diagnosed as diabetic by a Western doctor, would probably be prescribed acupuncture, various tonics and moxibustion — in which practitioners burn herbs near the skin of the patient. Spinach tea, celery, soya beans and other ‘cooling’ foods would also be recommended.”

Moxibustion? Really? Yup really, but for breech babies, only close to the skin of the fifth toes of both feet.

The president’s attack on the WHO: Walking a tightrope

Thus, there is a kernel of truth in the president’s criticism of the WHO as too China-centric. The WHO’s acceptance of nonsense and acceptance of blatant quackery over science cannot be defended or rationally explained.[1]

That probably is the unspoken basis of the conservative American attack on the WHO. That said, it seems highly unlikely to me that conservatives or the president would directly state that directly. If they did say that WHO acceptance of Chinese quackery is proof of some sort of bad or evil China-centric bias, it would also be an implicit attack on the multi-billion dollar counterpart American quackery industry. This aspect of conservative attacks on the WHO in their desperate attempt to deflect blame from themselves and the president needs to be understood. Their central, years-long role in royally screwing up America's response to the coronavirus pandemic and the needless deaths has to be shielded by deflections, lies and whatever other dark free speech they think will work for them in the 2020 elections. Truth and honest free speech are not on their side.


Footnote:
1. People who believe in unproven traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and/or alternative treatments in the West (nutritional supplements, neutraceuticals, unapproved stem cell treatments, etc.) vehemently disagree that there is no rational explanation. Some of them point to lots of anecdotal evidence parading as proof and/or statistically significant evidence from the few existing reasonably sized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trials as proof of efficacy. In almost no case is a plausible mechanism of action for clinical benefit stated. And when a plausible mechanism of action posited, the supporting data is usually (~98% of the time) statistically weak.

Despite the counterevidence, they KNOW that such treatments are effective and not quackery. I've have many engagements with believers on this and find that, like politics, minds in disagreement are unchangeable. Their beliefs are no less sincere or firmly held than people who sincerely and firmly believe that the Earth is flat, the Moon landing was faked, vaccines are toxic and ineffective, the president is a good, honest and/or patriotic person going a good or great job, or that the Earth is ~6,000 - 10,000 years old according to infallible biblical calculations. The human mind is capable of firmly believing all sorts of things, mostly or completely true, mostly or completely false, ambiguous, not proven, not provable, nutty, bizarre and a perception of goodness in flat out evil.