Trump Quits the World Health Organization. The Victim Is the United States.

Two weeks after President Trump fired off a characteristically intemperate letter to the director-general of the World Health Organization, accusing him of incompetence in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, the reputation of the agency has been damaged far less than the image of the United States. That is, to judge by the reaction of global public health specialists.

In the days that followed, the four-page, prosecutorial-sounding letter to Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus created shockwaves. The letter ended with the charge that WHO’s “repeated missteps” in handling the response to the COVID-19 outbreak “have been extremely costly for the world.” It gave Tedros 30 days to reform the body.

Then Trump, increasingly cornered politically, didn’t even get to halftime. On Friday, May 29, he did the unimaginable: withdraw the U.S. from the world’s most important health organization.

Why? It was a Friday afternoon, when Washington swamp creatures think no one is paying attention. Minneapolis was on fire after the murder of a black man by white police, and all Trump could do was fan the flames. Twitter had to moderate his rant—“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—which so many people interpreted as racist.

More than 102,000 Americans are now dead in a COVID-19 pandemic that history will record as the result of a lack of planning, denial and finally the “open up” America push. The U.S. now has the highest rate of unemployment in its history, and new COVID-19 cases are beginning to spike.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-quits-world-health-organization-203820249.html