W.H.O.

In theory (and only in theory) the UN's World Health Organization (W.H.O.) is the world's health police. Wikipedia defines WHO's role this way:

The WHO's broad mandate includes advocating for universal healthcare, monitoring public health risks, coordinating responses to health emergencies, and promoting human health and well being.[6] It provides technical assistance to countries, sets international health standards and guidelines, and collects data on global health issues through the World Health Survey. Its flagship publication, the World Health Report, provides expert assessments of global health topics and health statistics on all nations.[7] The WHO also serves as a forum for summits and discussions on health issues.

In early January, 2020, WHO was on the ground in China. It's mandate was to "monitor public health risks" and to "collect data on global health issues." At the same time, there was clear and copious evidence of a strange and ominous outbreak of pneumonias in Wuhan, China, known to multiple researchers and local politicians in Wuhan. Ben Lowsen reports on events in late December 2019 and early January 2020:

[The] Chinese Communist Party learned of the epidemic and made a decision to hide its existence, hoping it went away. Exposés in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and the Chinese mainland’s Caixin show that the information that did flow out of China early in the crisis did so only because of the courage of individual Chinese people in the face of government repression. People in the Wuhan epicenter, however, began to get wise — and scared (here and here) — by the end of December 2019, forcing their government to say something. The authorities gave the impression of a nontransmissible disease already under containment. We know now this was entirely false, likely designed more to ease civil unrest than protect the people.

The mayor of Wuhan even suggested that the central government prevented him from revealing details about the epidemic until January 20. Considering the first public announcements came out of Wuhan on January 1, we can assume that Xi had a sense of the danger prior to that.

Rumors within the health care community inside China were rampant. Some healthcare professionals courageously blew the whistle in defiance of the Chinese Communist Party.

From yesterday's post:

-- In early January, the Chinese government ordered all existing Wuhan coronavirus samples to be destroyed. [From 2010 onward, the prominent focus of Shi Zhengli, AKA The Bat Lady, and her team was a redirected to identifying the capacity for coronavirus transmission across species, specifically putting the spotlight on the S [spike] protein of coronaviruses.”

-- On January 2nd, an email from the Director-General of the Institute to all internal staff was circulated. The subject was “Notice regarding the strict prohibition of disclosure of any information related to the Wuhan unknown pneumonia.”

-- “February 3rd, Dr. Wu Xiaohua blew the whistle using his real name, that Shi Zhengli’s haphazard laboratory management may have led the Wuhan virus to leak from the lab. February 4th, Chairman of Duoyi, Xu Bo, blew the whistle using his real name, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was suspected of manufacturing and leaking the Wuhan virus.

Where was WHO during all of this? Were they unaware of the health care whistle blowers reports? Did they not see the growing number of strange cases of pneumonia? Were they not concerned about China's reticence to report the facts directly and expeditiously? Were they unaware of Shi Zhengli's work and uninterested in connecting the dots? Were they somehow influenced by the CCP NOT to report their concerns? At the very best, the WHO acted incompetently. At worse, it was complicit with the CCP in hiding growing concern about COVID-19 within China.

And now, the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media are clutching their pearls and expressing "concern" because the hated Donald Trump is asking these questions and threatening to cut funding to WHO.

In a perverse way, it's comical. The Dems are taking the side of an organization that at best didn't meet its mandate and at worse, through its inaction and silence, was complicit in the spread of COVID-19 in the USA. They whine that Trump didn't have the prescience to act in January (a ridiculous accusation) but somehow suggest that the WHO—on the ground in China and chartered with reporting health emergencies—was somehow innocent of any incompetence or wrong-doing.

I think back to the time that the Dems decided to become champions of MS-13, a hyper-violent criminal gang, only because Trump called them "animals". Now the Dems have become champions of WHO, an organization that has clearly dropped the ball (at best) and whose lack of reporting has contributed to the fact that all of us are now "sheltering in place" with 20 million people unemployed—only because Trump called out WHO.

Stupid is as Stupid Does.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is an amazing motivator for stupid.

And stupid should NEVER lead.

UPDATE:
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Claudia Rosett writes:

... China began colonizing the WHO at least 13 years ago, when China’s candidate, a former Hong Kong director of health, Margaret Chan, became WHO director-general, serving for 10 years before Tedros took charge. Chan was already controversial in Hong Kong for her slow and bungling early response to the 2003 SARS outbreak that spread from China to Hong Kong. Under her leadership, the WHO’s response in 2014 to the Ebola crisis in West Africa was a debacle — leaving the U.S. and a number of private medical charities to ride to the rescue. Commenting on this at the time, a Nov. 4, 2014, Wall Street Journal editorial noted that “since the 1990s the WHO has devoted ever more of it resources to political activism instead of its core disease-fighting mission — a loss of function that helps explain why the WHO failed to contain Ebola when it was less rampant.” Sound familiar?

If we judge by results, then as UN debacles go, the WHO’s 2020 failures, fictions, delays and Beijing boot-polishing in dealing China’s coronavirus outbreak rank right up there with the UN’s decision in 1994 to ignore desperate warnings from its own peacekeepers of the impending genocide in Rwanda. In that instance, more than 800,000 people were slaughtered. For the current pandemic, the cost in lives and livelihoods is already colossal, and we do not yet have a full tally. It would be gravely irresponsible of the U.S. to simply carry on bankrolling the WHO. An investigation into its public failures and internal rot is urgently needed — now — before the UN’s erstwhile health agency steers the world any deeper into catastrophe.

And yet, even with its history of incompetence, bad judgement and possible complicity, the Dems somehow characterize the WHO as a pivotal and irreplaceable element in the fight against COVID-19. Ya gotta wonder.