Harvard says Covid-19 surge across South did not come from northern vacationers, as CDC director claims
President Trump’s decision to withdraw US support for the World Health Organization is like firing a team of firefighters in the middle of a raging forest fire, three prominent public health experts argued Wednesday.
They compared the missteps in the coronavirus pandemic to a forest fire that goes badly wrong.
“Unfortunately, the models are imperfect. The wind turns in an unexpected direction. As a result, several towns are destroyed, and there are billions of dollars in damage,” Barry Bloom, Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Eric Rubin of the Harvard School of Public Health wrote in a commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine.
“If you were the current U.S. government, you would shut down the Forest Service in the midst of the fire. At least, that’s what’s happening now with the World Health Organization (WHO),” they added.
Trump and aides have blamed WHO and the Chinese government for the rapid spread of the coronavirus. The US now has more cases by far than any other country – 3.4 million, according to Johns Hopkins University. Brazil comes in second with 1.9 million. And the US has more deaths, with nearly 137,000.
“At some point there should be a reckoning, an evaluation of why the United States has done so poorly and who is responsible for the tens of thousands of excess deaths and billions of dollars in economic damage that have resulted,” the three experts wrote.
“But today, in the middle of the outbreak, we must take stock of where we are and how we can do better. To do that effectively, we need the WHO. We must not make the mistake of firing the firefighter in the midst of the fire,” they added.
WHO will struggle to survive without US support, they said.
“The United States is responsible for the largest amount of funding for the WHO, 22% of assessed dues, and provides the largest voluntary contributions – to polio eradication, nutrition, and vaccine programs, for example,” they added.
