The World Health Organization (WHO) allocates just 30 cents per person to support global health. Even in the absence of a pandemic, those 30 cents are hardly enough to ensure positive outcomes for all people on the planet.
In the 72 years since the WHO’s establishment, no member state had ever threatened to withhold funding as retribution for the organization’s performance. Yet, at the height of a global pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump has announced his intention to halt funding to the WHO, effectively reducing its budget by 15 per cent.
Founded as part of the United Nations in 1948, the WHO is the world’s central institution for directing and coordinating international health responses. Serving a global population of more than 7.8 billion people, its 2020 annual budget is just $2.4 billion – a pittance given the WHO’s role in supporting health system infrastructures and safeguarding humanity against disease. In particular, countries with limited public health infrastructure rely heavily on their relationship with the WHO.
Amidst a global pandemic such as COVID-19, this resource shortage has had deadly global consequences.
By threatening to withhold funds, Trump has publicly undermined the legitimacy of the WHO and questioned its capacity to coordinate a global response to COVID-19, setting a dangerous precedent at a time when the need for a trusted international body to coordinate public health efforts has never been greater. Instead, his actions place financial and political interests ahead of human lives.
Public health programs that often prevent diseases before they occur are generally invisible. Consequently, their value is often misunderstood. However, public health officials and institutions are embedded at every level of society and work tirelessly year-round to support population health.
During this crisis, public health experts are communicating evidence-based guidelines on handwashing and physical distancing; advocating for the rights of migrant workers and farmers providing our food; mobilizing shelters to accommodate physically distanced homeless populations; collecting and analyzing COVID-19 data to build epidemiological models; urging for equitable mental health responses; and much more.
Decades of critical public health research have demonstrated that pervasive global public health threats – including draconian border controls, colonialism, racism, sexism, income disparity, the prison industrial complex, and criminalization of sex work and drug use – endanger broad sects of the world’s population at the expense of all people. The strict separations that figuratively and literally separate parts of humanity from each other become especially superficial in the context of a pandemic.
The WHO’s paltry budget partially explains its inadequate response to COVID-19. However, historical and on-going financial and political interests have also marred its response. Truly mediating the harms of the COVID-19 crisis entails a non-partisan recognition that all people’s basic needs must be met to ensure adequate safety for populations across the planet.
Trump’s vindictive authoritarianism fundamentally works against the interests of people who lack political and financial power. His response to COVID-19 is no exception. After stoking the flames of anti-Asian racism, touting the benefits of an understudied malaria drug, and continuing harsh sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba among others, Trump has shifted his hostilities toward the WHO – undermining its important role in international public health – to divert from his shortcomings.
This is not to say the WHO is not without fault. Over the past few decades, it has made questionable decisions and has had monumental failures.
During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the global health community panned the WHO for being slow to respond and failing to act decisively. The WHO admitted that poor coordination with partners, ineffective risk communication, constrained surge capacity and inadequate community outreach capacity were critical shortcomings in its response.
The crisis also illustrated a perennial challenge undercutting the WHO’s efforts – the tension between its normative role to facilitate unified actions and expectations of a robust operational role (despite not having the mandate or resources to deliver).
But it’s precisely these missteps that point not only to the problem but also the solution. As the world’s foremost health institution, the WHO’s budget needs to be robust, predictable, and free from political overtures and threats.
COVID-19 has shown us that threatening to cut the WHO’s budget is the opposite of what we should be doing. The threat of lessened funding highlights a significant challenge that has plagued the WHO for decades – financial and political interests must be deprioritized for this international entity to successfully foster positive health outcomes worldwide.
In this hour of need, one key solution should be to significantly ramp up investments in the WHO. Failure to do so will consign our collective humanity, particularly women and children in the global south, to unspeakable tragedy and unparalleled human suffering. The only cost worth questioning is that of human lives lost globally.
All of the contributors work in the public health and public policy space in Canada and collectively have experience in global health settings across 21 countries in Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Tanzania), Asia (Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, the Philippines), Latin America & the Caribbean (Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama), North America (Canada, the United States), and have working relationships with partners in various other countries worldwide.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
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My believe is that WHO and UN are the most corrupted organizations in the world, they wast billions of dollars that could used to end the poverty in lots of Country in the World. Africa continent is in worse shape today that was in sixty more corruption today. Look at Angola, Eduardo dos Santos presidente for thirty years now lives in Barcelona in 8 million dollars house. The biggest problem in the world today is we still don’t teach people two basics in life. LOVE TO BE LOVED and RESPECTED TO BE RESPECTED. WE HAVE TO TEACH THE ARMY TO BE DISCIPLINED SO THEY WEAN THE WAR.
On October 24, 2017, the United Nations [UN] Special Rapporteur [SR] on the right to health, Dainius Pūras, presented his report on corruption to the UN General Assembly. He told his audience, “In many countries, health is among the most corrupt sectors; this has significant implications for equality and non-discrimination “… He noted some are related to the global pharmaceutical industry and others from “institutional corruption” and emphasized the “normalization” of corruption in healthcare which includes practices undermining medical ethics, social justice, transparency and effective healthcare provision, as well as illegal acts. Many researchers and scholars support the SR’s findings. We have seen this extend to the WHO but that should mean we should remain and fix the problems.
The current problem with the WHO is not funding. It is corruption, lack of transparency, and incompetence.
Its current head, Tedros, who is not a physician, displayed this behaviour in mismanaging, then covering up, infectious outbreaks in his native country. He became China’s favourite to head the WHO, which served them well when they abetted China’s cover-up of the virus outbreak origin, and the high person-to person transmissibility of COVID-19, for weeks, which then caught the rest of the world unprepared, with deadly results. Now that this has been exposed, they are helping China tamp down any critical review. Their medical lead, Dr. Bruce Aylward, refuses to come back to Canada to brief our parliamentary committee. Why?
This is not an agency, as currently constructed, that gives the world confidence, and thus does not deserve ongoing funding without agreeing to outside accountability. As the Five Eyes investigation becomes better known, the WHO must submit to uncomfortable questions. This is how science, and its management, moves forward from the current debacle.
“This is not to say the WHO is not without fault. Over the past few decades, it has made questionable decisions and has had monumental failures.”
So ‘good money after bad’ is your proposition? The WHO is now political – not health. The USA funds the WHO to an amount of nearly double than all the rest of the contributing nations combined. Trump is a lot of bluster and likely the US contribution will not go to zero. The WHO made its bed and perhaps the rest can step up their game – case in point – preferential messaging to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party over this covid situation is nothing short of egregious. This planetary shut-down is the direct result of the WHO’s mishandling and blatant false and dishonest reporting. Good for Trump – fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice – I cut your funding