Physicians united: Here’s why pulling out of WHO is a big mistake

Andis Robeznieks
American Medical Association
Originally published 8 July 20

Here is an excerpt:

The joint statement builds on a previous response from the AMA made back in May after the administration announced its intention to withdraw from the WHO.

Withdrawal served “no logical purpose,” made finding a solution to the pandemic more challenging and could have harmful repercussions in worldwide efforts to develop a vaccine and effective COVID-19 treatments, then-AMA President Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, said at the time.

Defeating COVID-19 “requires the entire world working together,” Dr. Harris added.

In April, Dr. Harris said withdrawing from the WHO would be “a dangerous step in the wrong direction, and noted that “fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation “

“Cutting funding to the WHO—rather than focusing on solutions—is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world,” she added

The message regarding the need for a unified international effort was echoed in the statement from the physician leaders.

"As our nation and the rest of the world face a global health pandemic, a worldwide, coordinated response is more vital than ever,” they said. “This dangerous withdrawal not only impacts the global response against COVID-19, but also undermines efforts to address other major public health threats.”

The info is here.

Global health without justice or ethics

S Venkatapuram
Journal of Public Health
https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdaa001

The great promise at the start of the twenty-first century that Anglo-American philosophers would produce transformative theories and practical guidance for realizing global health equity and justice has largely gone unfulfilled. The publication of The Law of Peoples by John Rawls in 1999 formally inaugurated the emerging academic field of global justice philosophy.1 After 2000, numerous monographs, journal articles and conferences discussed global justice. And new academic associations, journals and research centres were established.

One remarkable aspect of the new field was that the stark inequalities in health across societies were often the starting concern. Despite our diverse philosophical and ethical views, reasonable people are likely to be morally troubled about the large inequalities in life expectancies between some sub-Saharan country X and the USA or another rich country. This initially shared moral intuition or indignation, then, motivated diverse arguments about what precisely is morally bad about global health inequalities and global poverty and the possible demands of justice. Some philosophers described what ‘our’ duties are or, indeed, are not, to help ‘those people over there’. Others minimized the distinction between us and them by arguing for theories of radical global equality, the arbitrariness of political borders and duties that follow from our complicity in transnational harms experienced in other countries.

Progress in global justice philosophy seemingly promised real-world progress in global health equity and justice, because health inequality was the foremost issue in philosophical debates on global inequality, poverty and claims of the ‘global poor’. At the same time, largely driven by HIV research, bioethics went global as it was exported alongside medical research to resource poor settings. Bioethicists also began to go beyond clinical and research settings to examine public health ethics, social inequalities in health and social determinants—from local conditions all the way to global institutions and processes. Nevertheless, as of 2020, it is difficult to identify any compelling conceptions of global justice or global health justice or to identify any significant philosophical contributions to the practical improvement of global health and inequalities. What happened?

The rest of the article is linked above.

Donald Trump: a political determinant of covid-19

Gavin Yamey and Greg Gonsalves
BMJ 2020; 369  (Published 24 April 2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1643

He downplayed the risk and delayed action, costing countless avertable deaths

On 23 January 2020, the World Health Organization told all governments to get ready for the transmission of a novel coronavirus in their countries. “Be prepared,” it said, “for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread.” Some countries listened. South Korea, for example, acted swiftly to contain its covid-19 epidemic. But US President Donald Trump was unmoved by WHO’s warning, downplaying the threat and calling criticisms of his failure to act “a new hoax.”

Trump’s anaemic response led the US to become the current epicentre of the global covid-19 pandemic, with almost one third of the world’s cases and a still rising number of new daily cases.4 In our interconnected world, the uncontrolled US epidemic has become an obstacle to tackling the global pandemic. Yet the US crisis was an avertable catastrophe.

Dismissing prescient advice on pandemic preparedness from the outgoing administration of the former president, Barack Obama, the Trump administration went on to weaken the nation’s pandemic response capabilities in multiple ways. In May 2018, it eliminated the White House global health security office that Obama established after the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic to foster cross-agency pandemic preparedness. In late 2019, it ended a global early warning programme, PREDICT, that identified viruses with pandemic potential. There were also cuts to critical programmes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), part and parcel of Trump’s repeated rejections of evidence based policy making for public health.

Denial
After the US confirmed its first case of covid-19 on 22 January 2020, Trump responded with false reassurances, delayed federal action, and the denigration of science. From January to mid-March, he denied that the US faced a serious epidemic risk, comparing the threat to seasonal influenza. He repeatedly reassured Americans that they had nothing to worry about, telling the public: “We think it's going to have a very good ending for us” (30 January), “We have it very much under control in this country” (23 February),
and “The virus will not have a chance against us. No nation is more prepared, or more resilient, than the United States” (11 March).

The info is here.