"Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden, as well as a host of other U.S. politicians, made the argument that the WHO did not act fast enough with its declaration. Whatever problems posed to the United States by the virus were not the responsibility of the U.S. government, they suggested; the fault lay with the Chinese government and with the WHO.
Our investigation finds that this argument has little foundation. The WHO’s reporting mechanisms are sound, but the WHO’s own ability to make these formal declarations—a public health emergency and a global pandemic, which come with serious financial consequences for member states—has been circumscribed; those who have constrained the World Health Organization—the United States and European nations—are the very same countries whose leaders are now complaining about Chinese influence over the WHO.
By the 1990s, it had become clear that the WHO’s old International Health Regulations—originally issued in 1969, with only a few minor updates and new editions over the two decades after that—were inadequate. For one, these regulations were produced before the emergence of very infectious, lethal, and recurrent infections such as Ebola and the avian influenzas. Secondly, these old regulations were made before air travel began to move about 4.3 billion passengers per year, the scale of air traffic now making the movement of viruses so much easier.
In May 2005, the 58th World Health Assembly revised the 1969 regulations, pointing out that the new regulations would “prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”
The North American and European states, in particular, insisted that the declaration of a PHEIC or global pandemic only be made after it was clear that air travel and trade would not be unduly interrupted. This restriction, essentially the core foundations of globalization, has constrained the WHO since 2005.
The new WHO regulations were tested when a new influenza emerged out of Mexico and the United States in mid-April 2009. This H1N1 was a combination of influenza virus genes that had links to swine-lineage H1N1 from both North America and Eurasia (thus the 2009 outbreak was commonly known as “swine flu”). It was first detected on April 15. On April 24, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded a gene sequence onto a publicly accessible influenzas database. On April 25, ten days after the first detection of the virus, the WHO declared the 2009 H1N1 outbreak a PHEIC. On June 11, the WHO said that a global pandemic was underway.
In 2020, the WHO took a month to declare a PHEIC for the coronavirus and took an additional two months after that to pronounce a global pandemic. It was slower to announce the emergency, but it took the same time to declare a global pandemic.
By July 2009, the dangerous H1N1 virus had a less lethal impact than the WHO had feared. However, for the full year from its first detection, 60.8 million people were infected and 12,469 died.
Almost immediately, the WHO was attacked for the June 11 description of the outbreak as a pandemic. When the WHO declares a pandemic, governments are expected to do a variety of things including mass purchase of drugs and vaccines. These are costly.
That December, members of parliament in the Council of Europe opened an inquiry into the WHO declaration. Fourteen members of the Council charged the WHO with what was essentially fraud. They said that “pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide. They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the rise of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines.” “The definition of an alarming pandemic,” they wrote, “must not be under the influence of drug-sellers.”
The criticism of the WHO stung. It had declared a pandemic, but the virus had stabilized very soon after the declaration. The WHO responded to such criticism with humility. “Adjusting public perceptions to suit a far less lethal virus has been problematic,” the WHO responded. “Given the discrepancy between what was expected and what has happened, a search for ulterior motives on the part of the WHO and its scientific advisers is understandable, though without justification.”
A WHO official told one of us that the agency had been shaken by the assault in 2009. Over the past ten years, the agency has struggled to regain its confidence, working through the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and then Zika in 2016. In neither of those cases was there a need to make any global declaration.
This year, the WHO declared a global pandemic within three months of the first cases. But there is no doubt that the attack on the WHO a decade ago has made an impact.
Former WHO employees tell us that fear of being attacked like this by the main donors seriously hampers the independence of the WHO and its scientific advisers. Trump’s current attack is going to weaken further the ability of the WHO to operate at its own pace and with credibility.""China’s Detection and Reporting of the Covid-19 Outbreak" (Stoll):
"It is tragic that much of the west, especially the US, squandered the time gained through China’s efforts. In our hemisphere, the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have acted quickly and successfully to control the virus. But most other governments (including our own), in thrall to neoliberalism, have not.
In a display of contempt for human life at home and abroad, the US government has failed to protect its own population from the disease, while continuing longstanding (and bi-partisan) wars and sanctions against peoples in both hemispheres that effectively turn the pandemic into a bio-weapon. Historians will undoubtedly view this moment of US history with particular revulsion."Chinese paper airplanes: "State Capacity Libertarianism with Progressive Characteristics".
"The Gates Millepus: A Thousand Tentacles of Money Entwine the Nation" (Mackenzie). This is interesting, but the claim about 500,000 (!) cases of Gate's vaccine causing child paralysis in India is obvious nonsense - and a little racist, as if the Indians wouldn't notice, or care - on the face of it that has been floating around anti-vaxxer sites. Actually, the program seems to have been a huge success. There is more than enough creepy about Gates that we don't need to make shit up.
Tweet (Bean):
"'The political nature of Julian Assange’s extradition process to the US can be proven beyond any reasonable doubt, as it involves large-scale espionage operations, violations of attorney-client privilege & cross-Atlantic legal pressures'—Baltasar Garzon head of Assange legal team""Coronavirus: Up to 60 bodies found piled in New York trucks after 'foul odour' reported" (Merrifield). Tweet (Borzou Daragahi):
"The Sweet Smell of Success"Tweet (Ben):
"Cherie Blair is not sure a long inquiry into the government's handling of COVID-19 is necessarily the right way to go because if inquiring into political decisions which lead to people needlessly dying her scum bag husband would be in prison"Celebrating the 75th in pure Nazi style: "Germany bans Hezbollah, conducts raids to find suspected members". "Can You Trust Historians?" (Durocher).
"Finance Capitalism vs Industrial Capitalism: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Are Destroying Us" (Vrettos interview with Hudson; also at Unz, where I suspect it won't go over as well; it's always a good idea to start with an 'anti-Semitic' joke):
"The Chicago School says any government spending is the road to the gas chambers. I’ve heard that said literally."and:
"There’s still not much discussion of the economic problem that really is at the root of this. People complain about the symptoms of inequality, even rich people do that. Everybody has books documenting inequality. But what they don’t want is a discussion of what’s creating it. Does the world have to be this way? What policies are needed to reverse it?and:
If you discuss that, and find that the root of inequality is the financial system indebting the economy and financializing real estate instead of making it the tax base, then you realize that you have to change the system. Today’s wealth is mainly financial and rent-extracting, taking the form of indebtedness for 90% of the population.
The only way to recover is to wipe out this debt. You can’t recover the real economy of production and consumption without wiping out the debt overhead, without rolling it back. That is what people are unwilling to see. They’re unwilling to look at the solutions, because that’s beyond the Overton window. It’s cognitive dissonance. Actually curing the problem is no simply rubbing your hands and saying, “Oh, isn’t that too bad?” If you criticize the debt system, however, you lose the coverage and the public media. That is why we’re on the Internet, not on The New York Times or Wall Street Journal."
"We are in a permanent depression. There can be no recovery without wiping out the debt overhead (euphemized as “wealth”). As long as you leave the 1% with the lion’s share of wealth (creditor claims) and property ownership, the economy cannot recover. Without realizing that, there cannot be a class consciousness regarding today’s world
Marx talked about the class consciousness of labor vis-a-vis its employers. That took place within the production and consumption sector. But today’s class consciousness of wage earners has to see that industrial companies have been turned into financial companies. They’ve been financialized. A relevant class consciousness must realize that it’s up to socialists to do what industrial capitalism failed to do – namely, to free society from the rentiersector, from the landlord class, the monopolists and financial creditor class. Without freeing society from them, you’re going to have a neofeudal economy. As Rosa Luxemburg said, it’s either socialism or barbarism. Barbarism is a permanent depression. All the classical economists warned against the landlord class, banks and the monopolists continuing to run society into the ground.""Save America, Throw the Landlords Under the Bus" (Rall). The only way to save Assholia, but Assholia is not for saving.
"What about the banks and landlords? I’m not suggesting that they should be stuck with the whole tab for COVID-19. Municipalities should waive real estate taxes. They should receive relief to cover their utility and maintenance expenses. Lobbying organizations for property owners point out that their members often have underlying mortgages themselves; those mortgages too should be subject to the payment holiday. Banks should receive infusions of interest-free cash from the Fed. But the U.S. can no longer afford to let these entities continue to collect real estate profits as usual.
Landlords should take the biggest bath for the simple reason that they are social and economic parasites. Value is added via the production process; landlords add no value whatsoever. If a revolution were to turn renters into homeowners by transferring titles, and abolish bank liens and property taxes and so turn homeowners into full owners, no one would miss landlords. Former renters and mortgage borrowers could easily assume the cost of maintenance that they currently pay to landlords and banks for pennies on the dollar.""Why The Left Keeps Losing And What They Must Do To Win" (Welsh):
"The left, bless their hearts, tend to think that there are rules, and that they can play by them, win, and be allowed to rule. But all along the process, the left’s opponents will not and do not play by the rules when facing the left.
This has a long history. The US overthrew multiple elected government overseas if they considered them left wing. At home, coincidentally, JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcom X were all assassinated in a period of less than ten years, and we are expected to believe the security apparatus had nothing to do with that. (This doesn’t even pass the laugh test.) There was a LOT of violence in the late 60s and early 70s, to the point of bombs going off every day, because there was, in fact a war going on and when the left realized their leaders were being killed and that peaceful victory would not be allowed, some of them fought.
They lost.
This is war. It is not a game.
Corbyn was deliberately sabotaged by his own bureaucracy, because he thought there were rules. His MPs sabotaged him. The press lied about him over 75% of the time. Sanders was taken out when every opponent except Biden all dropped out at the same time: a coordinated action which I can’t remember a precedent for. It was NOT normal, it is not what would have happened if a centrist had been beating Biden, they would have been allowed to win, and there would have been no nonsense about how that was happening because of a split field, because split fields are normal.
So, as with the seven rules, which include facts like having to restructure and (non violently) purge the press, the same is true of being a left winger. If you get into a place like Corbyn, you have to get rid of all the internal enemies. Not people who just disagree. This means all staffers who are not ideologically aligned. As for MPs, test them, the moment they do something traitorous (as Labour’s MPs did over and over again), remove them from the party. For all MPs, re-select. Note that Boris Johnson removed all MPs who challenged him on Brexit (his main issue) immediately when they crossed him. He then won the election handily.
You do this because neoliberals and conservatives cannot be trusted because they do not believe that left wing government is, or can be, legitimate. They already view it as war and they will cheat, lie and put you in jail if you can. All that failing they will engage in coups and assassination if they can.
You can’t play a game by the rules if the other side is determined to cheat and thinks you shouldn’t be on the field.
Oh, and if it’s not obvious, the police and the military always must be brought under control. This is a somewhat delicate process, but you cannot leave the violent institutions run by right wingers, as they are today. The second they have an excuse they will turn on you. (This is one of the things that Venezuela got right and why Maduro has not yet been overthrown.)
This is a violent conflict. Centrists and right wingers don’t even see old-style New Deal liberals as legitimate, and will do anything they can to destroy them. This is how it always was: they always hated FDR, they always hated the New Deal, they always hated and wanted to destroy the welfare state. They bided their time, used their power in conservative institutions of the deep state like the FBI and intelligence outfits, and they won. They learned by starting in peripheral nations like Iran, then they transferred what they learned back home."