Criticized for Pandemic Response, Trump Tries Shifting Blame to the W.H.O.

The president said he would halt funding for the organization because it caused “so much death” in the way it “pushed Chinese misinformation,” though he himself effusively praised China’s handling of the virus.

April 14, 2020


WASHINGTON — For weeks, President Trump has faced relentless criticism for having overseen a slow and ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, failing to quickly embrace public health measures that could have prevented the disease from spreading.

Recent polls show that more Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the virus than approve.

So on Tuesday, the president tried to shift the blame elsewhere, ordering his administration to halt funding for the World Health Organization and claiming the organization made a series of devastating mistakes as it sought to battle the virus. He said his administration would conduct a review into whether the W.H.O. was responsible for “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread.

“So much death has been caused by their mistakes,” the president told reporters during a White House briefing.

In effect, Mr. Trump was accusing the world’s leading health organization of making all of the mistakes that he has made since the virus first emerged in China and then spread rapidly. As of Tuesday, there had been about two million cases of the virus worldwide, and nearly 125,000 deaths. In the United States, there have been over 600,000 cases and 25,000 deaths from the virus.

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The basis for the president’s anger at the W.H.O. was his contention that it was too quick to believe information about the virus coming from the Chinese government at a time when it should have been more critical. He said the W.H.O. “willingly took China’s assurances to face value” and “pushed China’s misinformation.”

But it was Mr. Trump himself who went out of his way to publicly and repeatedly praise the Chinese government for its handling of the virus at a time at the beginning of the year that his administration was negotiating a trade deal with China.

On Jan. 24, about a month after the virus was discovered there, Mr. Trump tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency.”


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The question of whether the W.H.O. was not aggressive enough in recommending action against the virus has been raised in other countries. Some governments have noted that the organization’s leadership did not challenge China’s assertion in mid-January that there was not human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.

But the W.H.O. did issue urgent advisories throughout January about the potential dangers from the virus and announced that it constituted a “public health emergency of international concern” a day before the Trump administration made a similar declaration.

From Jan. 22 on, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director general, held almost daily news briefings to warn the world that the virus was spreading and that countries should do everything they could to stop it. Every day he repeated a mantra: “We have a window of opportunity to stop this virus. But that window is rapidly closing.”

Americans at World Health Organization transmitted real-time information about coronavirus to Trump administration

By Karen DeYoung, Lena H. Sun and Emily Rauhala

April 19, 2020 at 4:46 p.m. EDT


More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staff members are regularly detailed to work at the WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s assertion that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.


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U.S. participation in the range of Geneva-based U.N. organizations is supervised by the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, whose assistant secretary left office in November after the department’s inspector general issued a broad condemnation of his leadership, including “political harassment” of career officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump. It is currently headed in an acting capacity by a deputy.

But below the level of political appointments, communication between the U.S. government’s public health bureaucracy and the WHO has continued throughout the Trump administration.

In addition to working at the WHO, on assignments first reported Saturday by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, CDC officials are often members of its many advisory groups. The emergency committee advising the organization on whether to declare “a public health emergency of international concern” during deliberations in mid to late January included Martin Cetron, director for the CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine.

When China eventually agreed to let a joint WHO mission into the country in mid-February, it included two U.S. scientists among 25 national and international experts from eight countries, although the Americans were not permitted to visit the “core area” in Wuhan.

From the beginning of the outbreak, CDC officials were tracking the disease and consulting with WHO counterparts. A team led by Ray Arthur, director of the Global Disease Detection Operations Center at the CDC, compiles a daily summary about infectious disease events and outbreaks, categorized by level of urgency, that is sent to agency officials.

Arthur, according to a CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, has participated in the CDC daily “incident management” calls, discussing information he learned from WHO officials.

Information is passed up a chain of command from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services in daily reports and telephone discussions, this official said.

Any information of a sensitive nature about the growing outbreak was and continues to be shared by CDC officials with other U.S. officials in a secure facility located behind the CDC’s Emergency Operations Center at its Atlanta headquarters.

In the early days of the virus response, those officials included HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Information about what the WHO was planning to do or announce was often shared days in advance, the CDC official said.

Amsterdam restaurants prepare for new distancing rules.

 buddy wrote:
 
I used to snark that the world was going to decrease the population to have only the number of ordinary people that the uber-rich needed to keep themselves amused. But it's not very funny now.

Regarding the behavior of the GOP and Trump followers, I'm beginning to think of Covid-19 as a 'special' kind of fairy.  

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
It practically does.

 R_P wrote:
 

Her sign should read: "look at me, I'm an idiot"

 R_P wrote:
 

Notice how far apart each group is standing

... and if she's right, I guess I'm ok with Communism

Just a few days later, on Tuesday, Trump paused all U.S. funding for the WHO, upending crucial plans for containing the virus in developing countries and bolstering China’s narrative that it is stepping into the traditional U.S. role of global leader.

Interviews with current and former U.S. officials and the internal documents and communications show that despite Trump’s recent disparagement of the WHO, his administration was for weeks relying heavily on its expertise and global reach to fight the pandemic. And in a public relations battle between China and the U.S. over global leadership, American diplomats and aid officials have cited robust U.S. funding of the WHO as a key supporting argument.

a local team of doctors are adding ivermectin to their regimen with good results

Local Doctor Tries New Coronavirus Drug Treatment

It is not a cure.

That’s the first thing Dr. Jean-Jacques Rajter wants everyone to know about the treatment he’s using on his COVID-19 patients at Broward Health Medical Center.

“Ideally, the sooner you get to them, the better off they are,” said Dr. Rajter, a pulmonologist.


He and his wife, who is also a pulmonologist, are pioneering the use of an anti-parasitic drug called Ivermectin to fight the novel coronavirus.

“If we get to these people early, and what I mean by that is if their oxygen requirements are less than 50%, I’ve had nearly a 100% response rate, they all improve, if they’re on more oxygen than that, then it becomes a little more varied, some people, they don’t respond anymore because they are too far advanced,” explained Dr. Rajter.

Two weeks ago, Dr. Rajter started adding Ivermectin to the cocktail of drugs currently used to treat COVID-19: hydroxychloraquine, azithromycin, and zinc sulfate.

Since then he’s treated dozens of people with this combination, with results so encouraging, he calls them remarkable. Dr. Rajter is in the process of publishing a scientific paper, which could take weeks to publicize the findings.

“But if I wait, every day that goes by is another day when lots and lots of people get very sick, go to ICU, many of them die and that could theoretically even be preventable and that’s why I thought it was so critically important to get this information out there,” Dr. Rajter said.

He credits his wife, Dr. Juliana Cepelowicz-Rajter, with the idea of using Ivermectin for this purpose. She came across Australian research which showed Ivermectin destroys the virus in the lab, in vitro, but it has not been studied for this purpose in people.

“More studies need to be conducted,” Dr. Cepelowicz-Rajter said. “We haven’t had any ill effects from it and it’s readily available, we have some patients who are pretty advanced, not yet intubated, and even those, in 12 hours, they showed a significant improvement.”

 kurtster wrote:
 

The WHO had some tests we could have used as we ramp up our test production, but the usual process is each country with the ability creates its own tests. It takes a few days to come up with one and then it goes to manufacturing. That's fine, and routine (not a historic moon landing as you would have people think). But Trump installed a flack at CDC, and for whatever reason, the CDC's tests were slow to get started, and when they had one that worked in trials, it crashed and burned when it came time to scale it up. So just like that, we're a month or more late with getting tests to manufacturing. 

 Ohmsen wrote:
 

No but he's awfully good at distilling the message. He's fond of condemning people in no uncertain terms, and that's certainly a shortcut to getting to the point, but it isn't always precisely right. He sure flays the WHO and I don't really have an opinion there but the WHO has a huge interest in respecting cultures etc. so as to be seen as "not the enemy." That sort of dance does seem to have let them down here.

 kurtster wrote:
 

As a matter of logical thinking, Trump has a problem if part of his positioning strategy is to blame the WHO for being late in making the call on the threat: Trump repeatedly defends his early reaction  â€” arguing he did not downplay the threat — by citing his January 31 decision to impose a partial ban on flights from China. He notes that he was criticized for that decision, most especially by the WHO, he says. He says he went against the stream on that. He also has said he knew it was a pandemic long before WHO made that call. Yet, Trump also wants us to believe that any delayed reaction on the part of he or his administration was due in part to the WHO being late on making the call. In context, then, this makes no sense. Why would he forge ahead on January 31, going against the advice of the WHO, and then fall back during the month of February based on what the WHO was saying and advising? Cannot have it both ways. Either he was ahead of the curve and the WHO or he relied on the WHO to his and our detriment. 

edit: To clarify: I am addressing this as a matter of logic. I am not saying that the WHO is above criticism or without blame in its decisions and actions regarding the virus.

More sterling leadership...
Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster

 kurtster wrote:
 
wrong

 haresfur wrote: 
It is safe to conclude that the artist would not have put those names on the wheel if he or she thought that they could be responsible for anything having to do with the fallout from the direct effects of the virus within the USA.   So if none of those on the wheel are to blame, then that would leave Trump to blame by default, right ?  

Many politicians (Speaker Pelosi for one), pundits and some RPeeps here as well have already and repeatedly said that Trump has blood on his hands due to his handling of the virus.

Pretty straightforward.  

 kurtster wrote:
 

Let's see if I can explain the cartoon to you. It is about how Trump is blaming others for deaths in America. Not about other people blaming him. Pretty straight forward.