Editor’s note: This commentary is by Andrew J. Haig, M.D., a specialist in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Pain Medicine who practices in Middlebury and Williston. He is professor emeritus at The University of Michigan and president of the International Rehabilitation Forum.
Donald Trump admits losing control of the World Health Organization to China. The loss comes despite America’s strengths as the largest donor to that organization and the most powerful country in the world. To cover up his personal diplomatic failure he’s pulling out of the institution and removing American funding.
I’ve got some sense of the WHO, having worked with the organization and its leaders for decades. Long before Trump’s target for personal bullying, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, became director general of the WHO, he guided me in building Africa’s first training program for physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians in his native Ethiopia. There he was widely respected as a real doctor and a strong advocate for the health of his people.
Around the same time, the WHO and International Society for Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine adopted disaster response programs and research that I and my colleagues had begun after the failed American response to Hurricane Katrina. The WHO used our research on rehabilitation in Africa to build new standards for treating people with disabilities around the world.
Just last week as a member of the WHO task force on low back pain I met virtually with the best spine experts from around the world to find ways to promote excellence in dealing with the most commonly disabling problem in America.
On my committee we’re all volunteers with better things to do — if only there was a better thing to do. But there’s not. I do love treating my patients in rural Vermont, one by one. But my impact at home is a drop in the bucket compared to what a group of us can do when we use the authority of the WHO to set standards and inform governments. The WHO’s role in developing standards for care and pushing governments to do the right thing goes far beyond the Covid-19 crisis.
Here in the United States we benefit from the WHO. Without partnership in the WHO, we’ll be the last to learn about the next pandemic from Mexico or Tajikistan (or the spread of deadly ebola that WHO staff are risking their lives to track right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Without the WHO we will not benefit from the best of science: True, our country has some pretty good researchers. But the statistical fact is that most of the brains in the world live outside of our country. When we cut ourselves off from solutions elsewhere, we’re the ones who suffer.
The WHO is needed to help us improve care in our own community. Our American doctors and nurses are great, but our health care delivery system absolutely sucks, with more dead babies for the dollar than any other comparable country. We can either wing it and pretend we can fix this on our own or we can learn from the folks who are better than us.
It’s not just about America, though. Most of us were raised on religious traditions that began overseas and before this country existed. Our faith obligation to care for others has no borders. Yet Trump’s Make America Small Again approach to shrinking our international influence affects the lives and wellbeing of real people all over the world. Through the World Health Organization the United States and many other individual and country donors do work that keep children fed, keep their parents healthy so they can put food on the table, and keep their grandparents independent so they can pass on the love and wisdom that only that older generation can impart.
Can the WHO be made better? More efficient? Less influenced by autocrats? Of course! And as the most powerful member and richest donor, America can make it happen. But we need to lead, not follow, and certainly not get out of the way. The current president’s anger at the WHO stems from his own failure to control it despite our country’s overwhelming financial and political advantage. Typical of persons with certain personality diseases, he is striking out and hurting others instead of fixing the problem. This time the others he hurts will be us.
