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BBC: Coronavirus: US to halt funding to WHO, says Trump
US President Donald Trump has said he is going to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) because it has "failed in its basic duty" in its response to the coronavirus outbreak.
[...] Mr Trump has been under fire for his own handling of the pandemic.
He has sought to deflect persistent criticism that he acted too slowly to stop the virus's spread by pointing to his decision in late January to place restrictions on travel from China.
[...] The US is the global health body's largest single funder and gave it more than $400m in 2019.
A decision on whether the US resumes funding will be made after the review, which Mr Trump said would last 60 to 90 days.
[...] China gave about $86m in 2018-19; UK gives most of any country apart from the US
[...] The organisation launched an appeal in March for $675m to help fight the pandemic and is reported to be planning a fresh appeal for at least $1bn.
Reuters: Trump halts World Health Organization funding amid coronavirus pandemic
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would halt funding to the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic while his administration reviews its response to the global crisis.
Trump told a White House news conference the WHO had “failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable.” He said the group had promoted China’s “disinformation” about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak of the virus than otherwise would have occurred.
[...] The hold on funding was expected. Trump has been increasingly critical of the organization as the global health crisis has continued, and he has reacted angrily to criticism of his administration’s response.
[...] U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday it was “not the time” to reduce resources for the body.
“Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences,” he said.
American Medical Association President Dr. Patrice Harris called it “a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier” and urged Trump to reconsider.
[...] The Republican president recently accused the WHO of being too lenient with China in the earliest days of the crisis, despite having himself praised China in January for its response and transparency.
Trump has made frequent use of scapegoats during his short political career. He often lashes out at the media, Democrats, or others when he feels attacked or under pressure.
The Guardian: Trump turns against WHO to mask his own stark failings on Covid-19 crisis
Donald Trump’s declared suspension of funding of the World Health Organisation in the midst of a pandemic is confirmation – if any were needed – that he is in search of scapegoats for his administration’s much delayed and chaotic response to the crisis.
The US is the WHO’s biggest donor, with funding over $400m a year in both assessed contributions (membership fees) and donations – though it is actually $200m in arrears. [pdf]
Theoretically the White House cannot block funding of international institutions mandated by Congress. But the administration has found ways around such constitutional hurdles on other issues – by simply failing to disburse funds or apply sanctions, for example.
The funding could be formally rescinded, but that would require Senate approval, or “reprogrammed” by being diverted to another purpose that the White House could argue is consistent with the will of Congress.
[...] The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had to fly to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping on 29 January to negotiate entry and information sharing. A WHO team was allowed to visit Wuhan on 22 February. Tedros has been criticised for his flattery of Xi and the Chinese response, in the face of Beijing’s obstructionism and cover-up attempts. His defenders said that such diplomacy was the price for entry.
Trump did more than his own fair share of Xi flattery. On 24 January, the president tweeted “China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus … The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency.”
The claim that the delay in the WHO acquiring samples crippled the international response is also false. Chinese scientists publicly released the genetic sequence of Covid-19 on 11 January.
[...] By early February the WHO was in a position to distribute a Covid-19 test worldwide, but the US government opted not to have it fast-tracked through approval. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) instead produced its own test at about the same time, but it was flawed and had to be recalled. US testing would be set back more than six weeks compared to the rest of the world.
While virtually no testing was under way in the US throughout February, Trump assumed the consequently low number of confirmed US cases meant that his country had somehow escaped. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” he boasted on 24 February, nearly a month after the WHO declaration of emergency. “We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health [Organisation] have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @08:43PM (19 children)
It actually would, at least in urban areas where competition could work. You don't just cut funding to the under-performing school though, you have to shut it down. There's no real justification for schools to be a monopoly, unless you live in an area where there are more cattle than people.
Also, teachers need to be at-will employees. Sorry, teachers. Some of you are great, but all of you are regular people. Administrators can't do their jobs if they're not allowed to fire you, and this whole business where new teachers can barely afford to eat while "tenured" teachers can't be fired is a joke.
No successful organization runs with that kind of HR policy.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 15 2020, @09:44PM (3 children)
Be careful about teachers being at-will. That's how you get fundamentalist principals firing science teachers that teach evolution or sex-ed teachers who mention that birth control is a thing.
That's not to say that NO metrics should apply, just that the opposite extreme is filled with it's own pitfalls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:12AM
The people at the top can be hired and fired by popular vote. It should be just as easy to fire an admin as it is to fire a teacher, so if too many parents complain that the principal is a dolt, his ass is out the door too. OTOH, you have a point--East Texas could be off the hook with just the kind of people you're talking about, but isn't it already kind of that way? Followed by the football stadiums at high schools that would make some colleges envious... followed by non-union non-wage slave professional football players at colleges, but I digress.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @12:39PM (1 child)
Then the teacher and the students go to the schools that don't have fundamentalist principals. You're monopoly thinking.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday April 17 2020, @08:28PM
And you're invoking vapor as a solution to a real-world problem. Around where I am, the kids can either go to the nearby public school, or a much more expensive private school about 45 minutes away in good traffic (and traffic is never good around the time school starts).
No rule or regulation prevents a closer private school from opening, just prevailing market conditions.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday April 15 2020, @09:54PM (3 children)
The Administrators should be fired first, then replaced by the better-performing teachers. Then all students illegally here should be deported along with their parents. Then we put all of the low-IQ students in low-IQ classes where they belong away from the White and Asian kids, and offer trades with job prospects like in the ROP programs for those who want careers other than "gang-banger" or "dope-dealer." Ask every Jewish student if they believe that they are above the Goyim, and if they say yes, expel them immediately to the local fuckup school where they can see just how superior they are getting their asses kicked on a daily basis by the sons and daughters of the tenants their own parents just raised the rent on.
The only reason why American public schools have such a bad rap is because Bush II and Obama fucked them all to hell for an agenda to drag every student down to the lowest common demonimator to prepare them for lives as mindless consumers with no upward mobility.
(Score: 2) by FunkyLich on Wednesday April 15 2020, @10:24PM (2 children)
It is not just bad rep. It can be demonstrated that american students are less knowledgeable compared to students of the same age of other countries. It has been shown in international science Olympiads, geography Olympiads, linguistics olympiads, many times and consistently. It had been happening before Bush and Obama. What you see after them is that as time goes by, these incapable ex-students now get to teach the others after them. And they certainly can't. You can't teach what you don't know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @10:43PM (1 child)
It trickles down from colleges where you literally have majors like "Social Justice in Higher Education Administration" -- of course it leads to people pulling a Smollet on a grand scale: https://www.newsweek.com/racist-threats-attacks-that-rattled-california-university-campus-were-faked-police-say-1497533 [newsweek.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @12:37AM
Hi idiot, I see you failed middle school.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:22AM (10 children)
Nice theory, never heard of it actually happening, and even if the building got abandoned, where do you think all those teachers, students, and administrators went? Can you just kill them? No? Well, maybe just put them in jail, or on welfare somewhere out of the way? Doesn't sound any cheaper, or better, than throwing a little MORE money into the pit of despair, maybe even with a little extra staffing to bring in some outside perspective on what the rest of the world expects.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @12:41PM (9 children)
Elsewhere. They don't continue to hang out in an abandoned building by definition. Those terrible administrators, for example, can move on to industries more suited to their skills, like burger flipping.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:06PM (8 children)
Oh, you mean welfare. In theory it's good: Principal of a failed school forced to find another career. In my life, I've seen far too many people who continue to fail upward, or at least sideways, no matter how miserably they perform at each successive post.
Also, a school is more than the individuals that run and attend it - again, if you can manage to bust it up and reshuffle the bad apples into different barrels, maybe sometimes you'll get a better functioning combination - but, even if the bottom 10% of schools in an urban area are ranked and targeted for reshuffle every year, you're still just kicking the bad actors out into the job pool where they're going to find their way back into the schools, or welfare. Burger flipping doesn't pay enough to keep people off of SNAP or out of public housing.
Abandoning the buildings will never fly with the elected schoolboards... even though the personnel cost far outweighs the cost of buildings, they can't be seen to be "wasting perfectly good bricks" by closing a school, that won't get them the leg-up they're looking for to the local town council.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:52PM (7 children)
Even if we were to grant your ludicrous scenario, that's it's only the career of terrible principal or a life as a bum on welfare, it's still good to have them as bum.
So what? It's still an improvement.
Well, sure, there's buildings and budgets too. But that's it.
They can always sell the buildings or set up yet another school. You might sense that I have no care at all what elected schoolboards do with abandoned buildings.
Or any of those many, many other jobs.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:53PM (6 children)
Re: failing upward
I don't call the current president an improvement. Maybe some benefits from the general chaos, but overall we're losing much more than we're gaining, and besides, it's just so embarrassing.
No, my point was that it's not just the individuals, but the combinations of people - you can take two groups: ABC and DEF and they can both be seriously dysfunctional due to conflicts between A&B and D&E, but if you reshuffle them into groups: AEC and DBF both groups improve.
Mind you, both of my parents were career teacher/educators. They still believe (Dad more than Mom) in the maxim: those who cannot do teach.
Dad job hopped for a while, got a CPA - was capable of the work but not the drudgery, managed a "Big 8" accounting firm's software education/documentation department - couldn't deal with the corporate turnover policy that abused his workers (bad ones and good) so that they found better deals within a matter of months of starting there, eventually ended up with a PhD in education and teaching teachers at various universities.
Mom tried school administration for a year after about 25 years of teaching, it really didn't suit her - gave her the motivation to return to the classroom for another ~20 years.
Then we've got our kids' kindergarten teacher, who attended kindergarten at the school's opening in 1955 and was teaching kindergarten there in 2005 - nice woman, good with the kids, we called her "slushie" because of her tendency to be drunk as a pirate most of the time.
Point being: it's pretty easy to retrain from industry into teaching, if you're inclined to teach. Exiting teaching into other careers is much more rare, I had a friend in college who did it - lost track of him shortly thereafer, I do hope he managed to stay out of jail.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:27PM (5 children)
Over what? And he didn't fail upwards.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 16 2020, @08:54PM (4 children)
I wouldn't call him a success in real-estate, or entertainment.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 17 2020, @03:31AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 17 2020, @12:49PM (2 children)
Failing upwards is one of those relative term things... there are many others (the vast majority) who performed much much better and yet did not advance.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 17 2020, @05:20PM (1 child)
And I don't acknowledge your viewpoint.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 17 2020, @07:47PM
Well, we're all special snowflakes and no human should be abandoned, but...
I do not share your viewpoint that performers below the 60th percentile should be advanced, particularly in our pyramidal org scheme where each new level typically assumes some form of control of many people below them. That's what I call "failing upwards": doesn't do well at a lower level as compared to peers - but advances up the pyramid anyway. It's one step (sometimes many steps) worse than the Peter Principle, and it's frequently seen among the children of rich parents.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/