"Without a properly funded World Health Organization, we leave ourselves unprepared.”
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken apart Donald Trump’s reasons for pulling out of the World Health Organisation (WHO), as he warned that it was only a matter of time before the next pandemic breaks out.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an order to remove the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), citing its perceived mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and “unfair” payments as a driving force for doing so.
However, former Prime Minister Brown has blasted the decision to do so, writing a piece in the Guardian where he dismantled Trump’s reasoning.
Brown took on Trump’s claims that the U.S. was being ‘ripped off by the WHO’ and that it had burdened too much of the organisations expenditure, by explaining how ‘taking all assessed and voluntary contributions together, the US provides about 18% of WHO’s overall funding, hardly an excessive amount when compared with its 27% share of the world economy”.
While Brown accepts that countries such as China could be paying more, he reiterated that ‘the 18% contribution is not an argument for the US leaving’.
Brown also tackles Trump’s claims that the WHO is overly influenced by China. He writes: “The WHO’s head, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has repeatedly called on China to adequately investigate and rapidly disclose information about the origins of the Covid-19 virus that emerged in Wuhan five years ago. Indeed, Tedros has incurred Beijing’s public wrath for rightly insisting that all hypotheses around the pandemic’s causes remain on the table until China cooperates.”
The former Labour leader warns that “with increased mass travel, rising urban populations, and human encroachment on wildlife habitats – just three of the 15 drivers of global risk cited in a recent report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – a new pandemic is not a question of if but when. Without a properly funded World Health Organization, we leave ourselves unprepared.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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