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Originally Posted by Lzen
Do you trust the WHO completely? Do you believe they are politically unbiased? Or do they have a slant? I believe they are extremely biased in favor of China and therefore cannot be completley trusted.
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I'd argue that most people complaining about the WHO have almost no knowledge of their history and wouldn't have been able to speak with any merit as to what they did before two months ago (or their history even now). I'd also argue that those claiming the WHO is in the back pocket of China are digesting their information from a very narrow band of sources, which isn't sufficiently explaining how it operates and what China's push to promote certain leaders in that organization did.
The WHO was the organization that put boots on the ground to eliminate smallpox, a disease that killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. It's the only virus that has ever been eradicated, and they were as responsible for that success as anyone else.
They also provided the framework for the first international effort to address and tackle AIDS, which was led by an American named Johnathan Mann. Eventually, internal disputes about his role led to him resigning and the office went from 250 people down to four. The leadership vacuum was later assumed by UNAIDS. They are not perfect. The response to Ebola was criticized, but they also performed a number of other public health roles that have saved millions of lives that people have never heard about.
I'm not going to claim that they handled the situation well; they didn't. The reasons behind the decline of the WHO are interesting to read on their own, FWIW. But it's also easy to complain about that stuff three years later when faced with a terrible global pandemic, and it rings hollow when the same people in positions of power complaining about the WHO's actions were praising China's at the beginning of the year. Given that the US is the largest funding source of the WHO, one would expect a little more understanding of the WHO's internal functions at that time. Most bitching about the WHO's screwups is blame-shifting.
There exists a reality wherein China suppressed information and silenced whistleblowers that led to this becoming much worse (they did), the WHO bungled the response by not being sufficiently critical of China and listening to reports from others in Taiwan and southeast Asia (they weren't/didn't) and the US wasted weeks and weeks of forewarning (they did).
If we really believe in the idea of personal responsibility, then we also need to acknowledge our own failure in keeping this in check. It's not like the US didn't have preparedness plans or an outline for adequate stockpiles in place.