Who Needs the WHO? Not the World’s Poor

From FEE.org (May 11):

The World Health Organization is a large and antiquated United Nations body that is expensive unnecessary and counterproductive to its own cause of "public health." It's time to take the appropriate measures and defund it.

The WHO and Ebola: an Illustration of Failure

As the Ebola crisis was ravaging a number of African countries in 2014, we put our trust into a number of international organizations to assist West African countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea or Nigeria to contain the spread of the virus and aid those who were unable to receive medical care. The World Health Organization (WHO), with its ambitious goal regarding public health, was one of them. According to itself, the "WHO aims to prevent Ebola outbreaks by maintaining surveillance for Ebola virus disease and supporting at-risk countries to developed preparedness plans."

Experts in the field, however, beg to differ. As Reuters reported in 2015, a specialist panel convened by Harvard’s Global Health Institute (HGHI) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) concluded that immense human suffering went "largely unchecked" by institutional responders.

It turned out that WHO officials were aware of the outbreak in spring, yet it took until August for the World Health Organization to declare it a public health emergency and take action. This is months after the broader public was already made aware of the problems with the epidemic.

The WHO, however, does have priorities—in the same year that WHO reports failed to mention the Ebola outbreak, the UN's agency reported on the promotion of tobacco products. Even more striking is that the WHO's concern wasn't only that of tobacco marketing in Western European of Northern American areas but in the precise areas affected by Ebola.

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Over 2,500 people died from Ebola in Guinea, but rather than addressing the important health concerns of what could become a global epidemic, the WHO focused on cigarettes. Former WHO Director General Margaret Chan spoke at the sixth Conference of the Parties of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC COP6) in Moscow in 2014 (during the Ebola outbreak) and declared fighting smoking as the biggest priority for the WHO.

This is in line with the general priorities of this organization. The WHO has shifted its focus from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), caused by fatty foods, smoking, or drinking. Unimpressed by the large-scale consequences of nation-wide epidemics, the WHO prefers to play a nanny and regulates people's personal behavior. Is this what taxpayers expect to happen? [read more]

Sounds like the Left. The article goes on to say the travel expense for WHO is a whopping $200 million! Charities like Doctors Without Borders can do it cheaper and more effectively.