Matt Ridley’s reputation is dichotomous: on the one hand, he is indelibly stained in the minds of many with the failure of Northern Rock bank – one of the first rumbles of the Global Financial Crisis.
On the other hand, Ridley has a well-deserved reputation as a journalist: science journalist especially. His The Red Queen is standard reading in philosophy of science courses. Ridley’s books like The Rational Optimist also stand as a counterbalance to the alarmism of the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot. Ridley is also a trenchant critic of statist bureacracies. When asked for his “dangerous idea”, he suggested: “Government is the problem not the solution”.
It’s no surprise, then, that Ridley has a low opinion of the World Health Organisation. So when Dominic Raab, Britain’s foreign secretary, suggests that the WHO should be at the forefront of an inquiry into the Xi virus, Ridley is not exactly enthusiastic.
This is a terrible idea. WHO is full of good people with good intentions, but as a body it has very serious questions to answer about its own conduct before we trust it with looking at that of others.
That’s putting it mildly. US President Trump has a better idea: defund the WHO. Let it wither and die.
After all, the WHO is almost as complicit in this pandemic as the ghastly Xi regime.
There are three charges against WHO. First, it failed to prepare the world for a pandemic, spending the years since the Sars and ebola alarms talking more about climate change, obesity and tobacco[…]
Second, once the epidemic began in China, WHO downplayed its significance, tweeting as late as January 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus”, when it had already been warned by the Taiwanese health authorities among others of strong evidence for medical staff in Wuhan becoming ill.
The Chinese government at this stage had known for weeks that the virus was spreading, probably person to person, yet WHO then sycophantically praised the Chinese government. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response,” said WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a former foreign minister of Ethiopia, a country run by a repressive regime heavily dependent on China. “China is really good at keeping people alive,” echoed the assistant director-general, Bruce Aylward, on 3 March.
The WHO’s bootlicking of the Chinese communists should hardly be a surprise. They’re dancing to the tune of their paymasters.
China is a big funder of WHO and insists that Taiwan be excluded from the organisation since it does not recognise Taiwan’s existence as a separate country. Taiwan banned travel from China very early in the pandemic.
This is not the first time the WHO has abjectly failed the world which pours billions into its coffers.
The third charge against WHO is that it has failed before. When the ebola outbreak in West Africa that was to kill 11,000 people began in late 2013, on its own admission WHO hindered the fight against the virus, obsessed with not letting others find out what was happening. In April 2014, the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres announced that the outbreak was out of control. They were promptly slapped down by a WHO spokesman. Others tried again in June to alert WHO. It was not until August that WHO admitted the gravity of the situation.
So, the WHO couldn’t care less about deadly epidemics and panders to murderous communists. But it does have some priorities…
[A]t the height of the ebola epidemic, Margaret Chan, the then director-general wrote an article in which she called climate change the “defining issue of the 21st century[…]
WHO gives the impression it would rather reprimand rich countries for climate change or bad eating habits than worry about epidemics. It’s also a bit obsessed with celebrities.
So it’s in the image of its parent body, the UN.
Like the UN, the WHO should be defunded, kicked to the curb and abandoned by any and all nations committed to freedom and democracy.
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