Big opportunity for other nations to step in and exploit the continent further, just like China with its "influence, military bases and resources in return for jobs and infrastructure" projects.
Maybe some European projects? But I guess we will keep sending Tshirts and cheaper milk instead to further undermine African local economies.
Agreed, and obviously the WHO is highly motivated to say something dire will happen at the withdrawal of large amounts of money.
AID to Africa has largely has been an unintended yet sad disaster. The best example of this is when the British were leaving East Africa in the 1960's they, reasonably, decided to administer the polio vaccine widely. Likely this massively furthered the spread of AIDS, which is thought to have crossed from monkeys to humans sometime in the early 1950s.
You can still find articles seeming to espouse the hypothesis on several sites, but from what I've seen they are all quite old and poorly sourced, with no follow up.
While the polio vaccine pathway has been completely debunked medical interventions in colonial Africa have likely been a co-factor in the emergence of HIV due to unsanitary injections of antibiotics and some vaccines.
For the most part the consensus agrees that the colonial period in Africa likely induced conditions that caused SIV to develop into HIV, and likely more than once.
Humans can get infected with SIV albeit they don’t develop AIDS from it and their viral load drops quite rapidly which makes purely sexual transmission unlikely.
SIV has been known to be quite effective at jumping species through serial transmission during the acute phases with as little as 3 hosts needed until it can effectively infect other species however direct SIV to HIV evolution has never been observed.
So for the most part while HIV has likely emerged in the late 19th century the colonial era which introduced urbanization, increase in trade, slave labor conditions, GUD causing STIs and mass injection campaigns is what pushed HIV’s pandemic emergence.
That said it’s not clear what would’ve have happened if these conditions weren’t present or simply delayed HIV might still have emerged through globalization and the general conditions set by the latter half of the 20th century.
Ironically the emergence of HIV and AIDS in the west has been instrumental in pushing viral epidemiology research and the development of antiviral treatments and protocols to the front stage and between the late 80’s and early 2000’s huge progress and advancements have been made.
I personally believe that without a viral disease that can and does infect the rich and the powerful which causes them to slowly die over decades while drastically effecting their quality of life, life style and mental health we might have been 2 decades behind on viral research compared to today if not more.
Does anyone actually think that the US will cut funding to the WHO entirely? This strikes me as a clear negotiation tactic: remove the people in charge that have concealed information and acted according to the CCP's whims, and then funding will be restored.
The WH message appears to be that the funding will be cut until WHO is investigated. I suppose this helps prevents a half-assed investigation on the WHO side.
Let's be blunt: this is a blatant attempt to displace the blame for mishandling the emergency. Trump needs popularity because elections are coming, he doesn't want to take the blame for his own actions, so he will blame China, the WHO, and other countries, or his own staff, if things get worse.
At least the US are taking it seriously now. China and the WHO alerted the world that this wasn't a regular flu variant since before January.
On a related topic, thanks to their totalitarian government, China controlled the pandemic effectively, and will recover its economy faster. The US will resort to more commercial war to level up the field.
It's a good example of how much good the USA does in the world.
The reason why the funding cut has happened is obvious.
But this "Just-world hypothesis" by everyone else is just annoying.
WHO did pretty good considering. They are simply not going to be fast moving with unknowns.
We all had the info, we didn't need them to hold our hand and call it a pandemic. We didn't need them to tell us to wear masks. If we wanted to complain about WHO and Taiwan we should have done it last year, now is not the time.
We failed ourselves. And we still are failing ourselves. Simple things we should be doing are still not happening.
> we didn't need them to.. fast moving with unknowns..
They weren't just slow, WHO helped spread false and misleading information, and one of their main reasons for existence is to combat this. If WHO can't be trusted as a source of information, what are they good for?
> If we wanted to complain about WHO and Taiwan
I only just found out about this, now the spotlight is on them. Now is exactly the time, as the main complaint is that the WHO has political motivations that interfere with its main objectives, and this is evidence of that - doubly relevant because if Taiwan weren't being ignored, other countries might handled it as well as they did.
Bruce Aylward, assistant director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), has disappeared among the list of leaders on the organization's website a day after awkwardly refusing to answer a question about Taiwan's exclusion from the UN agency.
During a video interview with Radio Television Hong Kong journalist Yvonne Tong (唐若韞) on Saturday (March 28), Aylward claimed not to have heard her question about whether the WHO would consider Taiwan’s membership. When the journalist tried to repeat the question, the WHO official asked her to "move on to another one."
After Tong insisted on getting Aylward’s comment on the Taiwan issue, the advisor appears to have ended the call without notice.
Welcome to politics, where the WHO would rather estrange a disputed island nation than one if the biggest world powers.
If we get the governments of the world to acknowledge Taiwan then yes, the WHO should follow suit. However, barely any countries acknowledge Taiwan as a nation and the WHO is part of the UN.
The person being interviewed handled the situation very badly, but it's stupid to expect Taiwan to be part of the WHO until at least the United States, the EU and Russia officially acknowledge it as well.
Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) on Tuesday (March 24) confirmed that it had warned the World Health Organization (WHO) about the human-to-human transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) in December of last year.
No it won't. It makes no geopolitical sense for the US to sacrifice its influence in an A-list international organization for sake of a few measly million bucks.
> There will be $400M or so more in the US budget.
Just for context, I've been on conversations in a state healthcare agency in a US state that where adapting to an incentive provision in federal law was dismissed on the basis that doing so would delay achieving more immediate state priorities for only on the order of a couple hundred million of federal funding.
Annual federal (not total, or even national public just federal government) spending on health is over $1 trillion; $400 million seems like a lot of money on an individual basis but it's not, in that context, even a meaningful amount.
Eh budget comparisons can be used to justify everything. Fact is $400M annually is a fuckton of money and the vast amount of tax payers would agree. Also it's not like the US is seeing any kind of benefit from it.
Maybe some European projects? But I guess we will keep sending Tshirts and cheaper milk instead to further undermine African local economies.