WHO World Health Org
===
merri ok
primary on covid trump scapegoat (BS conspir works b/c ground laid for it? just replay/remix of tropes eg ark pjt --> crooked hillary)
aha? anti-commie globalist automatically discount anything from supranat'l, this corona bs?
target softened up by previous attacks by berman, milloy, bate, monsanto...
5/20 bak malaysia
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no lnx
'The cognitive dissonance is frightening': Inside the manipulation of Trump's supporters
John Stoehr June 29, 2025
As I was editing the following interview with Charles Gaba, founder of ACAsignups.com, I was reminded of something Will Stancil told me during my chat with him. Will said, “I think people are used to living in a relatively stable era and have come to believe that stability is normal."
Will was talking about the dominant interpretation of political history among liberals. For most of us, the battles of the past settled the biggest arguments, and from those settlements arose a period of relative peace and stability that nearly all of us take for granted.
Will said: “Liberals have trained themselves to see the world through this very particular end-of-history lens, where the ‘stuff that matters’ is inevitably wonky policy questions, the day-to-day of taxes and government, who gets subsidies, what healthcare policy looks like.
“But it’s ridiculous. History isn’t over, the future will contain events as dramatic and horrible as the events of the past, and this stuff is just what it looks like: an assault on the foundations of our government, with all the terrifying and weighty implications that it seems to have.”
Complicating this is the concept of American exceptionalism, which is to say, the idea that America is the exception to the rule of the world. In most of the nations in global history, might has made right. The law was never applied equally, or universally. It has usually been just another tool of political elites to maintain their preferred status quo.
But liberals don’t want to believe that about America, even when they acknowledge that the country often falls short of its stated ideals. We tell ourselves that whatever tyranny we face is a temporary setback to the inevitability of America's soul being revealed once and for all.
Because of this faith, most liberals, but not only liberals, can’t imagine a future in which the government is trying to hurt them. We say that that only happens in times like the early 20th century, in places like Soviet Russia or Maoist China. There are no gulags here, we say. The government can’t possibly seek to inflict mass suffering and death.
We have to change this mindset. America is just like any other country. It’s not that special. We can love it, flaws and all, even when it’s not the exception to the rule of the world. The battles of the past century have not settled the biggest arguments. Social instability arising from insane public policies will almost certainly become the new norm. And the government can, as it seems to be doing now, try to kill the sickest 5 percent of the population to create conditions for controlling the rest.
In the dark disturbing interview with healthcare policy expert Charles Gaba that follows, the specter of social Darwinism lurks in the background. The unstated belief behind every policy decided by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is “the survival of the fittest,” in which the strong should rule and the weak should die.
“Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘MAHA’ goal,” Charles said.
Robert F Kennedy Jr wants to change the way children are given vaccines. First, is there a problem with the status quo? What are they looking for that we don't know about, if anything?
To the best of my knowledge there aren't any issues with the status quo beyond some states being far too lenient on vaccination requirements (religious objections, etc). My view is that the sole exceptions should be people who have legitimate medical conditions, which make them unable to take a particular vaccine.
The argument seems to be that children are being over-vaccinated as a way of padding drug companies pockets with unnecessary vaccinations. The claim seems to be that children are extremely unlikely to die from or to be seriously harmed by covid, for instance, and therefore, it's unnecessary to vaccinate them – except that even if true, they can still be carriers who infect higher-risk adults, and so on.
It seems like this is what happens when conspiracy theory finds traction in public health policy. Is that right and why?
Absolutely. The most recent anti-vax movement (sparked by [British fraudster] Andrew Wakefield and popularized by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy) started out as more of a left-leaning thing via "granola mom" types (I believe Marin County, California, is considered the "birthplace" of that resurgence) in the late 1990ss and early 2000s.
I think – and again, I'm not an expert on this – it began gaining major traction among Republicans during the 2016 GOP primary when Donald Trump told a vague anti-vax story about a supposedly non-autistic child who "became" autistic after getting vaccinated.
And of course this thinking went into overdrive among MAGA Republicans during the covid pandemic, even though it was the administration of their own lord & savior, Donald Trump that helped develop the very mRNA vaccines they were protesting against.
Since then it's gotten so far out of control that Republican lawmakers in several deep-red states – including Iowa, Montana and Idaho – have actually introduced legislation that would ban mRNA vaccines!
The cognitive dissonance is frightening.
So conspiracy theories are being used to rationalize political outcomes? If so, one of the outcomes is death. Getting rid of people is a rightwing goal, historically. We can say that reasonably, no?
Vaccine specialist and science communicator Edward Nirenberg put it best this morning: "If I were HHS secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken."
In this particular instance he was referring to yesterday's announcement that RFK Jr is withdrawing US funding from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), but he could be talking about any number of other policy changes RFK Jr has made already.
I don't know if it's a "rightwing" goal generally, but it sure as hell seems to be the goal of the Trump administration and MAGA Republicans.
When RFK Jr rolled out his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign, the assumption was that he intended to make existing Americans healthy. Instead, everything he, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his "MAHA" goal.
Call it Operation Nietzsche, I suppose.
I've written several explainers about the goals of the Affordable Care Act and how health insurance risk pools work, which involve this concept: Generally speaking, around 5 percent of a given large population tends to eat up around 50 percent of all medical spending.
Kennedy’s and the administration’s "logic," therefore, seems to be that if you simply killed off the sickest 5 percent of the population, healthcare costs for the remaining 95 percent would be cut in half.
This is obviously immoral and appalling, but it also seems to be the driving force behind many of their decisions.
It sounds like social Darwinism has been restored in popularity. I mean, even MAGAs, who will themselves be killed by such policies, will nevertheless support them if they also kill people who are "undeserving." It's like a suicide cult that few can see.
This is a trend that folks like Jonathan Metzl (one of his books is literally titled Dying of Whiteness) have been talking about for years, and which I analyzed extensively during the covid pandemic.
I found a direct and steep correlation between Trump support and covid death rates as well as a direct inverse correlation between Trump support and vaccination rates at the county level.
Lyndon Johnson famously put it best:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Another goal of rightwing politics is social control. Kennedy came close to saying that when he said this week his goal is everyone wearing "wearables" in four years. How is this even debatable?
The irony goes through the roof. One of the biggest and most absurd conspiracy theories among the MAGA anti-vax crowd regarding covid vaccines was that they supposedly included tiny "microchips" that would "magnetize" you, and allow Bill Gates to track your every move etc. (Of course, the fact that everyone carrying smartphones around these days pretty much allows various companies to do exactly that already was apparently lost on them).
Yet many of the same crowd gush over Elon Musk's companies, including Neuralink, which literally implants microchips into the human brain, and Tesla, which can literally track the location of their cars (so can most other carmakers to some extent these days).
And now you have RFK Jr pushing for "everyone" to wear small devices on their bodies that allow private companies and/or potentially the federal government to track not only your every move but your most private medical and health data via biometrics, etc.
Meanwhile, Republicans in some states like Virginia have introduced bills to track women’s menstrual cycles, something which Vice President JD Vance was a proponent of as recently as 2023.
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AN 125
Donald Trump's list of orders just seven days as the 47th president of the United States is getting longer — and receiving more and more pushback from journalists and political experts.
The Associated Press reported on Monday that "U.S. public health officials have been told to stop working with the World Health Organization, effective immediately."
Per the news outlet's report, :Experts said the sudden stoppage was a surprise and would set back work on investigating and trying to stop outbreaks of Marburg virus and mpox in Africa, as well as brewing threats from around the world. It also comes as health authorities around the world are monitoring bird flu outbreaks among U.S. livestock.
READ MORE:[Trump in for rude awakening as some Republicans less than enthusiastic about his agenda: report
Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan slammed the latest Trump move via social media, writing: Self-destructive insanity
John Pelissero, political scientist and Government Ethics scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics of Santa Clara University, wrote: "Not surprising that Trump is back with an uncaring approach to public health. This is not a policy area for disrupters."
Washington Post contributing editor David E. Hoffman commented: "Sure, everyone drinking up detergent will stop the next pandemic. Brilliant."
BIRD FLU KIA 1 US 1 25
===
an 125
Only one day into Donald Trump's second term, The Atlantic's David A. Graham is able to pinpoint the biggest factors that make this time around so "different" from the MAGA leader's first presidency.
Noting that, in 24 hours, the 47th president of the United States has already "pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 rioters, including some involved in violence," moved "to end birthright citizenship," removed the US from the "World Health Organization, attempted to turn large portions of the civil service into patronage jobs, and issued an executive order defining gender as a binary," Graham submits these actions "would have caused widespread outrage and mass demonstrations if he had taken them during his first day, week, or year as president, in 2017."
Furthermore, The Atlantic staff writer adds that these steps have "been met with muted response, including from a dazed left and press corps," when just eight years ago, "hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Washington, and Americans flocked to airports at midnight to try to thwart Trump’s travel ban."
READ MORE:**'Like a unicorn': Legal analysts demolish Trump’s 'lunatic fringe' arguments on key issue**
Graham submits,"The difference arises from three big factors. First, Trump has worked hard to desensitize the population to his most outrageous statements. As I wrote a year ago, forecasting how a second Trump presidency might unfold, the first time he says something, people are shocked. The second time, people notice that Trump is at it again. By the third time, it’s background noise."
He added, "Second, Trump has figured out the value of a shock-and-awe strategy. By signing so many controversial executive orders at once, he’s made it difficult for anyone to grasp the scale of the changes he’s made, and he’s splintered a coalition of interests that might otherwise be allied against whatever single thing he had done most recently."
Finally, "American society has changed," Graham emphasizes. "People aren’t just less outraged by things Trump is doing; almost a decade of the Trump era has shifted some aspects of American culture far to the right."
READ MORE:**Trump kept his promise — and made some Democrats look like fools**
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9 24
tperkins
X (Twitter)
By a vote of 219-199, @RepTiffany's No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act passed the U.S. House.
This bill will guard our national security and ensure the voices of the American people are heard.
FRC scored in favor of the vote.
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rww5 23
- Erik Maulbetsch @ Colorado Times Recorder: Boebert Promotes ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy at Rally Opposing World Health Organization.
no lnx grt pix
NEWS
Boebert Promotes ‘Globalist’ Conspiracy at Rally Opposing World Health Organization
by
Erik Maulbetsch
posted on
May 18, 2023
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined many of her Freedom Caucus colleagues in a full-blown “globalist” conspiracy press conference yesterday.
In addition to a dozen or so members of Congress, the “Exit the WHO [World Health Organization]” event at the Capitol featured organizer Frank Gaffney, a notorious Islamophobe whose Center for Security Policy is an anti-Muslim hate group.
Gaffney and the lawmakers, including Boebert, made numerous unsubstantiated claims, from the World Health Organization being controlled by China, to blaming it for the COVID pandemic, to claiming it is the vehicle for a plot to force all nations under a single worldwide government.
Image created by Gaffney’s Sovereignty Coalition blames the WHO for all American COVID deaths.
Gaffney kicked off his remarks with a claim that has been repeatedly debunked:
“The Chinese Communist Party runs the World Health Organization,” said Gaffney. “It runs the World Health Organization in furtherance of its long-standing objective of global governance- that’s one world government.”
In advance of the rally, Gaffney’s Sovereignty Coalition has created a “meme library” for the purpose of attacking the WHO. The images are rife with unsubstantiated conspiracies, including one that says: “The W.H.O. killed over One Million Americans?” presumably blaming the organization for all American COVID deaths.
None of this is true. The fact checks debunking the various claims are legion, and longstanding. Here’s a line from the Associated Press:
“CLAIM: A legally-binding World Health Organization ‘pandemic treaty’ will give the organization the authority to control U.S. policies during a pandemic, including those on vaccines, lockdowns, school closures and more.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The voluntary treaty, which is in draft form and is still far away from ratification, does not overrule any nation’s ability to pass individual pandemic-related policies, multiple experts, including one involved in the draft process, told The Associated Press.”
Boebert mentioned several classic conspiracy tropes in her brief speech. As the fact-check above makes clear, the U.S. is not surrendering its sovereignty to the WHO. She then lists three reasons the WHO is bad: she claims it’s controlled by China, it’s linked to the World Economic Forum, and it sabotaged the investigation of COVID’s origin. None of these are true. The WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations, governed by an executive board of 34 countries that currently includes the United States and China.
While there are disputes over how aggressively the WHO pursued the COVID origin investigation, it’s Boebert’s second point that raises the conspiracy red flag. Without any context or follow-up, she links the WHO to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is a dog-whistle reference that “globalist” conspiracists no doubt heard loud and clear.
“On Day One Biden made it clear he wasn’t fit for the job when he brought the United States back into the World Health Organization,” said Boebert. “The results of Biden’s failed foreign policy is absolutely astonishing. The Biden Administration plans to surrender U.S sovereignty to unelected bureaucracy— [interrupted by heckler]. To paint a clear picture the Biden Administration is giving the same organization that is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the same [that has an] affiliation with the World Economic Forum, and the same organization that sabotaged an investigation into the origin of COVID, more control over the American people’s lives. The WHO continues to spread lies and disinformation by praising China’s response to the virus as transparent, which frankly isn’t true.
“Before Biden took office the WHO was unable to do anything without written permission from our government. Now, if Joe Biden gets his way the WHO will have even more control over the most most private parts of our lives. This is not about public health! The WHO made it very clear they will censor anyone who does not agree with their agenda to control every aspect of people’s lives. They want total control over vaccinations, digitalization of health records, and your travel. Under this plan the Biden Administration is adopting Marxism by distributing medicine based on “equity.” This is not what a constitutional republic looks like. This is a dictatorship and we must defund the WHO and stop this radical agenda being put forward by the Biden Administration.”
Sovereignty Coalition tweet promoting John Birch Society’s petition to defund the WHO.
Responding to an email request for evidence of her claims and comment on her participation in the rally, a spokesman for Congresswoman Boebert sent a number of links to previous statements and two published reports.
With regards to why she references the World Economic Forum, the spokesman offered five previous tweets she wrote attacking the WEF.
Those include:
“Rather than trying to please Klaus Schwab and George Soros, the people elected to serve our nation should try and actually make the lives of the American people better.”
“Klaus Schwab: ‘The future is being built by us.’ Take it from me, you don’t want to be a part of ANY FUTURE designed by the WEF – because globalism isn’t about YOU, it’s about THEM CONTROLLING YOU.”
Another tweet references a conspiracy that “the WEF announced they hired hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to police the social media narrative.” The conspiracy was debunked the same day as Boebert’s tweet.
Conspiracies accusing the World Economic Forum of attempting to control the planet and place all humans under a single global government are widely understood to be antisemitic.
Her office also shared a May 2022 opinion column by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that contained nearly all the points Boebert made in her speech, some in nearly identical language.
A week prior to yesterday’s rally, Gaffney’s group also shared content from another organization making the same “call: “defund and withdraw” call: the infamously racist and conspiracist John Birch Society.
U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Chip Roy (R-TX) urged the public to call Congress and demand passage of a pair of bills they have introduced that would end American payments to the WHO and withdraw the United States from the agency.
The John Birch Society also supports their legislation, as well as the overall “Exit the WHO” demand. It echoes the Sovereignty Coalition’s conspiracist claims on its own website:
“The WHO’s threat to national sovereignty and individual freedom is becoming increasingly blatant and obvious,” claims the John Birch Society. “Not only is the WHO effectively controlled by Communist China and other subversive globalist interests, but it is actively seeking greater, totalitarian control over its member nations, along with all of humanity. If the WHO gets its way, U.S. national sovereignty will become a thing of the past, and the WHO will have total power to mandate vaccinations, impose vaccine passports, and implement a digital health ID— worse, the Biden administration is trying to help the WHO achieve its tyrannical goals.”
Another Sovereignty Coalition meme links the WHO to drag queens, apparently implying some sort of international plan to introduce LGBTQ content to children.
Boebert isn’t the only Coloradan connected to the Sovereignty Coalition. Dede Laugesen, a former Trump campaign staffer and wife of Colorado Springs Gazette editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen works for Gaffney.
She promoted the rally on social media and was praised by longtime anti-WHO activist James Roguski, who after the event wrote “All the credit for the press conference goes to Frank Gaffney, Reggie Littlejohn, DeDe Laugesen, everyone at Sovereignty Coalition.”
The full video of the press conference is available to watch here.
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===
an 3 23
Republican lawmaker recently shared a bizarre analogy of how the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and he's tying it into politics.
:{On Thursday, March 2, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) appeared on Newsmax where he discussed the COVID outbreak and its origin. When asked about the White House's hesitance to publicly agree on the origin of the virus, the Florida lawmaker offered his take.
}:
According to Steube, a lot of the circumstances surrounding the virus stem from the Chinese Communist Party.
READ NOW: Connecticut Republicans demand 'guardrails' on medical marijuana: report
"If there is reporting that determines that this was released from this laboratory as a bioweapon to your point," he said. "I, I, I think I would not be shocked. The Chinese Communist Party is the number one national security threat to the United States. I obviously don't have evidence that there was an intentional leak right now."
He added, "Uh, but uh, I certainly wouldn't be shocked that that was something. Look, you had Trump coming into his reelection. Uh, they hated President Trump because of the policies that he took. Strong on China, would love nothing more, uh, than having somebody like Biden who's compromised in the White House. So it would not shock me at all."
Steube also went on to offer a conspiracy theory about the World Health Organization (WHO) as he suggested that it is secret Chinese-operated.
"And if that is the fact, then this administration in our government needs to act accordingly. So does the rest of the world, quite frankly.So does NATO, the un, the World Health Organization that's basically run by the Chinese Communist Party," Steube said. "We need to take a strong action against that type of release from the Chinese Communist Party, if that in fact is true."
===
https://www.rebelnews.com/carbon_credit_cards_the_world_economic_forum_s_new_climate_agenda
carbon credit cards?! The World Economic Forum’s new climate agenda
Mastercard and the UN announced their partnership for these carbon footprint monitoring credit cards, which will cut off your ability to spend once you hit your carbon max.
On last night’s episode of :{:{The Ezra Levant Show}:}:, guest host Sheila Gunn Reid spoke to Marc Morano, creator of :{ClimateDepot.com,}: about the World Economic Forum’s plans to use the ‘COVID template’ of micro-monitoring individuals in order to fight climate change.
The World Health Organization has declared that climate is the greatest health threat of the twenty-first century, and if the climate is left unchecked we will get more COVID-like viruses.
“So, if you don’t support the net-zero, Green New Deal, U.N. climate agenda, you are a grandma killer because that’s gonna lead to more runaway viruses,” said Morano.
Morano talked about how Al Gore joined forces with Google to come up with the 'Climate Trace Initiative' which is essentially a carbon social credit system that will monitor 70,000+ individual CO2 emitters such as farms, factories, and businesses.
“Mastercard and the UN last year announced their partnership for these carbon footprint monitoring credit cards. In other words, if you’re spending money it’s gonna monitor it, if you’re buying meat, gas, putting your thermostat too high, spending money on energy bills, then whammo, it cuts off your ability to spend once you hit your carbon max.World Economic Forum praised this credit card, Visa this year is joining it,” he said.
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===
1120 an
'Blackmail': Trump 'blindsided' officials with list of 7 demands for World Health Organization. 'It was an enormous backfire'
===
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/dr-i-p-freely/
dr bananas
Having basically surrendered to the coronavirus, Republican President Donald Trump has increasingly said that he'd like to stop focusing on COVID-19 prevention measures and instead go for "herd immunity." The White House is even backing a petition signed by thousands of doctors around the world who support the idea.
The only problem: Many of the petition's signers are fake, using names like "Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas," according to TruthOut.org.
Herd immunity is a term often applied to widespread vaccine use, in this case means "allowing the virus to spread in the general population … so that allowing those least likely to be killed by the virus to return to normal life" while protecting those most vulnerable to the virus' lethality.
While that might sound appealing, the Trump administration has shown how poorly it protects the most vulnerable—the lack of a national prevention strategy, widespread affordable testing, and Trump's refusal to use the Defense Production Act to get manufacturers to make widely available personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare workers are just its most glaring failures.
Dr. Fauci says herd immunity through widespread infection—w/ vulnerable populations protected—is “really problemati… https://t.co/PnVTKvQQDO
—Firing Line with Margaret Hoover(@Firing Line with Margaret Hoover)1602885919.0
To promote the idea, which Trump has repeatedly mentioned on the campaign trail, the White House has shared a petitioned calledThe Great Barrington Declaration,promoting the idea. However, anyone can sign the petition and declare themselves as a doctor, including people who work as massage therapists, psychotherapists and homeopaths, a practice with no proven medical benefits.
Furthermore, on Monday, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the herd immunity strategy "scientifically and ethically problematic" because scientists don't know enough about how much immunity a person gains after catching COVID-19 and how long it lasts, especially since some people have been infected by the virus more than once.
"Letting the virus circulate unchecked therefore means allowing unnecessary infections, suffering and death," he said.
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china adds 2b$?
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===
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/how-tucker-carlson-manipulates-president-trump
Trump apparently changed his mind about whether the United States should fund the World Health Organization in response to a monologue from Fox News host Tucker Carlson. It’s at least the third time this year that Carlson’s program has triggered major changes in U.S. policy, an indication of just how effective the Fox prime-time star is at manipulating the president.
Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported Sunday that Trump, who declared last month that he was freezing the United States’ $400 million annual payment to the WHO, had been “on the brink of announcing” he would restore roughly 10% of the funding up until “late last week.” But then someone leaked the draft of the announcement to Carlson, who broke the news on his Friday-night show, denounced the WHO’s handling of the novel coronavirus, and argued against the funding. Carlson’s appeal seems to have reached the president, as Swan wrote that in light of the segment, Trump was now “leaning toward preserving his total funding cut.” And indeed, on Monday, Trump sent a letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus threatening to permanently pull all U.S. funding if the organization did not “commit to major substantive improvements in the next 30 days."
Many Fox personalities have used the president’s obsession with their network to influence U.S. public affairs in recent years, dictating everything from border-wall construction contracts to federal pardons to government shutdowns. But Carlson is better at this game than any of his colleagues. Twice this year, he staked out a position drastically different from virtually everyone else at Fox -- on whether the U.S. should escalate with Iran and whether the administration should take the coronavirus more seriously. And each time, he reportedly succeeded in shifting Trump’s thinking -- and federal policy.
Carlson is particularly adept at winning over the president because of his unique grasp of Trump’s psychology. Trump is a paranoid xenophobe who is fixated on his grievances and cannot handle even the slightest criticism, and Carlson crafts his argument accordingly. He almost never knocks Trump directly for his decisions, instead railing against the purportedly nefarious advisers who must have led the president astray. And his framing of the issues constantly plays to Trump’s hatred of foreigners, Democrats, political correctness, and the media.
Friday’s WHO segment provides a good case study in how Carlson exploits Trump’s weaknesses to shift his opinions.
[vid]
carlson began his monologue by presenting the potential partial restoration of funding as a surprising decision -- “bet you didn’t see this coming” -- and setting it up as a dispute between “the Trump administration” and Trump himself. He did this by contrasting the pending move with the president’s own harsh criticism of the WHO.
“Last month, you'll remember, the administration cut off U.S. funding at the president's direction. That amounts to about $400 million a year,” he said. “They did this, as the president explained, because the World Health Organization badly mishandled and lied about the coronavirus pandemic and is of course nauseatingly subservient to the government of China.”
He then pinned the pending decision on Trump’s advisers, saying, “We're told the president supposedly has agreed to sign the letter, if he hasn't already. It would be interesting to know who convinced him to do that.”
Carlson read from the draft letter, which states that the U.S. agrees to pay as much as China does. He then blamed the State Department, saying this would happen “if the State Department gets its way,” before arguing that the U.S. still won’t have as much influence as China with the WHO.
Next, Carlson reminded his audience -- including the president himself -- why Trump opposed the WHO funding in the first place.“Now, there are certainly many reasons that the president was deeply skeptical of the World Health Organization in the first place and stopped funding it,” he said. “Director Tedros Adhanom has thoroughly disgraced himself and his organization for years, but particularly throughout this coronavirus epidemic.”
In particular, Carlson homed in on the WHO’s criticism of Trump’s travel restrictions. Trump has described his decision to restrict some travel from China as a crucial move which he baselessly claims saved “hundreds of thousands” of American lives, and his political career has been centered in part on castigating claims of racism as “political correctness.” Carlson knows this, and so he sneered that the WHO had “attacked” the restrictions as “unnecessary and needless to say, racist.”
Carlson went on to castigate the WHO for supporting “Chinese propaganda,” which “killed people,” particularly criticizing Tedros’ delay in “calling the virus a pandemic when it clearly was.” In blaming the WHO, Carlson carefully avoided holding Trump accountable for ignoring months of warnings about the virus from U.S. public health agencies, his advisers, and the intelligence community, and ignored Trump’s own praise of the Chinese government’s response in the early weeks of the virus’ spread. Again, when Carlson is trying to influence Trump, he does not criticize him.
Carlson then provided a scapegoat whom he suggested was responsible for the possible partial restoration of WHO funding. “And yet, there is one person who has long, always through thick and thin, been a fervent fan of Tedros, and that's Dr. Anthony Fauci,” he said, pointing a finger at the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a frequent target of the program. After airing a clip of Fauci praising Tedros, Carlson concluded, “Well, doubtless, Dr. Fauci will be thrilled with tonight's news that we're going to continue to fund the World Health Organization.”
After the monologue, Fox medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel joined Carlson to discuss the potential restoration of WHO funding. For the most part, both stuck to the same talking points from Carlson’s monologue, praising Trump, blaming the pending decision on advisers like Fauci, and highlighting the importance of travel restrictions. “There are people around him whose instincts are reliably bad as his are on target,” Carlson concluded of the president.
But notably, the interview featured a direct appeal from Siegel to Trump to reverse the pending decision. “I have a message for President Trump tonight, too. Please don't sign anything that restores funding to the World Health Organization before there's a huge overhaul of the World Health Organization,” Siegel said. “Yes,” Carlson replied. While
engage in this sort of direct appeal to the president, Carlson largely avoids that strategy in favor of more subtle commentary, using the second-person to make every viewer a stand-in for Trump. But this time it appears to have succeeded, as Trump’s letter to Tedros demanded “major substantive improvements” before funding could be restored.
Carlson employed similar tactics in trying to convince the president not to further escalate with Iran following the U.S. killing of Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. He argued on his January 2 broadcast that Trump himself is “wary” of war, but may have been “outmaneuvered” by advisers who are “reckless and incompetent,” like former national security adviser John Bolton. And he leaned on the president’s xenophobia, saying that those advisers “are the very same ones demanding that you ignore the invasion of America now in progress from the south.”Carlson’s commentary diverged dramatically from his colleagues, but reportedly shifted the president’s thinking in his direction.
Likewise, the March 9 Carlson monologue credited with helping convince Trump to briefly take the coronavirus more seriously includes no direct criticism of the president. Even as Carlson said that “people you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” he avoided calling Trump out, thus making it far more likely that the president would listen to him. And the monologue was filled with xenophobic references to the “Chinese coronavirus” and attacks on Trump’s frequent target, the “corrupt media establishment.”
Carlson appears to have figured out the secret formula to winning over the president through his television show: No criticism, attacks on his advisers, and a spoonful of racism to help the medicine go down.
===
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beware FT
https://www.ft.com/content/1a25aeb9-f645-434f-b3e1-4ab62cf5ebed
no lnx
US backs away from WHO move on access to Covid-19 treatments
Trump warns US will quit body if it fails to ‘commit to substantive improvements in next 30 days’
...
https://www.ft.com/content/1a25aeb9-f645-434f-b3e1-4ab62cf5ebed
US has rejected wording in a World Health Organization resolution that backs the rights of poor countries to ignore patents in order to gain access to a Covid-19 vaccine or treatment.
Washington dissociated itself on Tuesday from elements of a motion passed by WHO members, saying that it sent “the wrong message to innovators who will be essential to the solutions the whole world needs”.
Many governments, particularly in Africa, fear they will be squeezed out by richer countries unless they can force companies that discover anti-Covid-19 therapies to share their intellectual property with manufacturers able to produce them cheaply at scale.
African ambassadors in Geneva, where the WHO is based, said US diplomats had sought to persuade them to support a dilution of language in the resolution, a proposal they had rejected.
Washington did not vote against the resolution proposed by the EU and others but instead issued a statement that repudiated the wording of several parts of it, including three paragraphs relating to emerging Covid-19 therapies. These included references to the so-called Doha Declaration, in which World Trade Organization ministers said governments could overrule intellectual property in a public health emergency.
“The United States recognises the importance of access to affordable, safe, high-quality, and effective health products and the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivising the development of new and improved health products,” the US said in an objection note. “However, as currently drafted, [the three paragraphs] send the wrong message to innovators who will be essential to the solutions the whole world needs.”
The move comes as US president Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of the WHO unless it demonstrates its independence from China in an escalation of his efforts to blame Beijing for the virus emergency.
In a letter published late on Monday, Mr Trump warned that the US would permanently end funding to the international body if it failed to “commit to major substantive improvements in the next 30 days”.
The US president castigated the WHO and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, its director-general, for “repeated mis-steps” in its coronavirus pandemic response that had proved “extremely costly for the world”.
Mr Trump accused the WHO of neglecting to share information about the initial Covid-19 outbreak in China, failing to press Beijing sufficiently for answers, and of making “grossly inaccurate or misleading” claims about the disease. The WHO has previously denied the allegations.
The resolution over patents is being discussed at a virtual two-day meeting of the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s governing body, which concludes on Tuesday.
“The US made some input trying to water down the references to Trips and patenting,” said one west African ambassador to Geneva, referring to Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. “The US is certain they will be the first to get the vaccine, but it might not be true.”
[Recommended
Jennifer Prah Ruger
The World Health Organization can be reformed]
Illustrating the concerns about richer countries getting earlier access to any vaccine, Ellen ‘t Hoen, director of the research group Medicines Law & Policy, said it took a decade for African countries to get affordable Aids medicines, during which time millions of people died.
“What we have seen in the past is that high-income countries rush to the front of the queue and leave the rest of the world to fend for themselves,” she said.
The US and other nations with strong pharmaceutical sectors, including the UK, Switzerland and Japan, had wanted language explicitly referring to the Doha Declaration removed from the resolution, according to an early draft seen by the Financial Times.
They wanted instead to emphasise the role of intellectual property in promoting innovation and to encourage equitable access to any Covid-19 vaccine or treatment through voluntary mechanisms, including donations and partnerships.
The debate over intellectual property is part of a broader tussle between China and the US over who develops a vaccine first and how it will be distributed.
Xi Jinping, China’s president, on Monday appeared to back the position of developing countries, when he said any vaccine “will be treated as a public good”.
As the source of the outbreak, China has a special responsibility to pay more and to give more
John Ullyot, White House National Security Council]
In an address to the World Health Assembly — itself controversial because of US accusations that Beijing covered up the initial Covid-19 outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan — Mr Xi said China would donate $2bn over two years to respond to the crisis, especially in developing countries.
The White House described the Chinese offer as a “token to distract from calls from a growing number of nations demanding accountability for the Chinese government’s failure to meet its obligations?.?.?.?to tell the truth and warn the world of what was coming”.
John Ullyot, the White House National Security Council spokesman, added that “as the source of the outbreak, China has a special responsibility to pay more and to give more” to the global health body.
Diplomats said Washington had pushed strongly for language calling for an independent investigation “at the earliest possible opportunity” into the WHO-led response to the outbreak.
In a letter seen by the Financial Times, African ambassadors in Geneva said attacks on the WHO’s Mr Tedros “from some quarters” had an “unfortunate racial overtone”. In the letter, first published in Africa Confidential, a specialist newsletter, the ambassadors said in an apparent dig at Washington that “failures at the national level should not be attributed to the WHO”.
In April, Mr Trump said the US would suspend funding of the WHO. Some diplomats thought an independent inquiry could be a precondition for Washington to resume contributions. Mr Trump on Monday did not comment on the Chinese announcements but repeated his recent attacks on the WHO, saying it was “a puppet of China”.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-sends-letter-threatening-permanent-freeze-of-us-funding-to-who-written-for-his-base-and-to-deflect-blame/
... Trump on Monday sent a four-page letter to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, threatening to permanently freeze U.S. funding to the United Nations agency in the midst of a global pandemic that has made international cooperation as crucial as ever.
Trump’s letter, which he posted to Twitter Monday night, repeats the president’s accusations that WHO is deferential to China and says that if the organization “does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization.”
The president also alleged that WHO ignored early warnings about the spread of the coronavirus and made “grossly inaccurate or misleading” claims about the virus. Observers noted that much of Trump’s critique of WHO’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic applies to the White House’s handling of the crisis, which has been condemned as fatally slow and inadequate.
“This is a phenomenally damning letter—of the president’s own response,” tweeted HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte. “All of those early dates? Late December and January? Were known to U.S. officials and relayed to Trump. Who did nothing.”...[lancet disputes]
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aei? 5/20
| World Health Organization is not salvageable | World Health Organization is not salvageable |
|---|---|
| John Yoo and Robert Delahunty | Newsweek |
| The coronavirus pandemic has revealed how the Chinese Communist Party has corrupted the World Health Organization. | The coronavirus pandemic has revealed how the Chinese Communist Party has corrupted the World Health Organization. |
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-far-right-extremists-who-hate-hillary-clinton-are-now-turning-their-venom-on-dr-anthony-fauci-report/
no lnx
far-right extremists who hate Hillary Clinton are now turning their venom on Dr. Anthony Fauci: report
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci addresses his remarks and urges citizens to continue to follow the President’s coronavirus guidelines during a coronavirus (COVID-19) briefing Wednesday, April 22, 2020, in the James S. Brady White House Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Written by Alex Henderson May 15, 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic went from bad to worse in the United States — where, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the COVID-19 death count has passed 85,900 — millions of Americans turned to Dr. Anthony Fauci as a valuable source of information. But the expert immunologist, who is part of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, has his share of unhinged critics on the far right. And journalists Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng, in an article for the Daily Beast, report that many Trumpistas are showing Fauci the type of hatred they typically reserve for Hillary Clinton.
“A cadre of influential conservatives is growing increasingly convinced that the nation’s foremost infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is recklessly driving the nation to financial ruin — possibly even in a concerted attempt to undermine President Donald Trump,” Markay and Suebsaeng explain. “And in an effort to stop him, they’re resorting to tried and true methods, from public shaming to online conspiracy theories to lawsuits meant to unearth e-mails pertaining to his work.”
The article is headlined “Team ‘Lock Her Up’ Is Now Going After Fauci” — a reference to the “lock her up, lock her up” chants aimed at Clinton at MAGA rallies. In fact, Markay and Suebsaeng note, some of the Trumpistas who despise Fauci are “key figures who helped spearhead the campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections” — for example, formerBreitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon, who served in Trump’s administration in 2017.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/team-lock-her-up-is-now-going-after-anthony-fauci
This week on his podcast, Bannon claimed that Fauci “set up President Trump for failure in the fall and asserted, “Understand this: Tony Fauci has not been around from 1984 because he doesn’t know how to play the game. He is a master game-player.”
:{
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Another Fauci critic, Markay and Suebsaeng add, is Tom Fitton, who serves as president of the right-wing Judicial Watch and “announced this week that his organization would be suing the National Institutes of Health in an effort toobtain Fauci’s communications about the coronavirus with the World Health Organization.”
Fitton described Fauci as part of the “medical establishment,” claiming that people of his ilk are “probably more liberal in their world view.”
A White House official, quoted anonymously, told the Beast, “The president knows how much the liberal media loves Dr. Fauci. There are times he thinks that can be played to (Trump’s) advantage. There are other moments when he finds it irritating.”
It should be noted that the far-right wingnuts who hate Clinton and Fauci typically hate former President Barack Obama as well. The same pro-Trump media outlets that have been bashing Fauci this week have also been promoting the wacky “Obamagate” conspiracy theory.
Markay and Suebsaeng point out that althoughRep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is among the “conservative stalwarts” who has “rushed to Fauci’s defense,” there are many Trumpistas who don’t share her high opinion of him — and the Beast reporters noted that a recent CBS News poll found a lot more support for him among Democrats than among Republicans.
Liz Cheney
@Liz_Cheney
Dr. Fauci is one of the finest public servants we have ever had. He is not a partisan. His only interest is saving lives. We need his expertise and his judgment to defeat this virus. All Americans should be thanking him. Every day.
164K
5:54 PM - May 12, 2020
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48K people are talking about this
“Among Democrats,” Markay and Suebsaeng write, “Fauci’s standing borders on that of a folk hero.”
“For some influential conservative pundits,” they explain, “Fauci is seen as, at best, misguided and, at worst, a malicious obstacle to Trump’s agenda and his political prospects in November. And for that reason, he has found himself on the receiving end of a host of fringy conspiracy theories blaming him for the damage ostensibly done by White House-backed policies to limit public gatherings and commercial activity in response to the virus.”
Markay and Suebsaeng cite Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade and Lou Dobbs as some of the far-right pundits at Fox News or Fox Business who have been bashing Fauci.
“Rare is the case where a leading scientist becomes a boogeyman in national politics,” Markay and Suebsaeng note. “But the country finds itself in rare times. Fauci has served Republican and Democratic presidents alike, but none like Trump — who has been as keen on monitoring Fauci’s media hits as he is at consuming his public-health policy advice.”
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imi 420
Vijay Prashad and a team of writers have produced an authoritative account of how the U.S. has done everything in its power to distort China’s response to the coronavirus, principally as a means of distraction from our own failures at home.
...Facts and Ideology
Florida Senator Marco Rubio accused the WHO of “servility to the Chinese Communist Party.” He wrote that the United States will open “investigations into the WHO’s unacceptably slow decision-making on whether to declare a global pandemic and into how China has compromised the integrity of the WHO.” U.S. funds for the WHO are in the balance. Characteristically, Rubio offered no facts.
Was the WHO slow in declaring a global pandemic? In 2009, the first known case of H1N1 was detected in California on April 15; the WHO declared a global pandemic on June 11, two months later. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the first known cases were detected in January 2020; the WHO declared a global pandemic on March 11—one and a half months later. In the interim, the WHO sent in investigation teams to Wuhan (January 20-21) and to Beijing, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Wuhan (February 16-24); their investigation, before the declaration, was thorough. The timeframe for the WHO declaration is similar, even faster in 2020 than it was in 2009.
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320 corona fail
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/16/climate-science-deniers-downplayed-covid-19-cato-acsh-aei
Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks
By Sharon Kelly • Monday, March 16, 2020 - 15:25
no lnx many
On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.
The very next day, theAmerican Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?”
“Is coronavirus worse than the flu?” it began. “No, not even close.”
“It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won't go far,” ACSH added. “And the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem.”
ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadly consequences.
American Council on Science and Health?
The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of “peer-reviewed mainstream science,” in the words of the organization’s mission. Their experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write critically about companies like Monsanto. The group has received funding from oil giants including ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, chemical and tobacco industries to name a few.
When it comes to climate change, ACSH has published a steady stream of articles downplaying climate science and criticizing efforts to slow carbon emissions — even in the face of a mountain of peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis.
ACSH slammed the medical journal The Lancet as “an ideologically driven outlet with a very clear political agenda where being sensationalist and culturally woke trumps evidence and reasonability” (after the Lancet published an article titled “The carbon footprint”). The purported “pro-science” advocacy group has labeledGreta Thunberg’s activism “doomsday prophesying.” It has (falsely) suggested that climate change is less of a concern because “more people die in winter than in summer” (they don’t).
And that’s all just in the past nine months. The ACSH’s stance against climate action dates back to at least 1997.
When it comes to coronavirus, now a global pandemic, ACSH’s authors rushed to judgment. They assured readers that there was little to worry about, and put some of the same faulty thinking that underlies their stance on climate change on display.
ACSH isn’t alone. Other organizations that have also engaged in climate science denial made similar missteps on COVID-19, including prominent organizations that fanned the flames of conspiracy theories or confidently promoted complacency when circumstances required rapid action.
To be clear: No one should be faulted for failing to foresee precisely how severe of a problem COVID-19 would prove to be. None of us has a crystal ball and few, if any, expected this situation to unfold in this particular way.
But these organizations published positions that not only wound up being laden with false reassurances, but they did so based on claims that they made confidently at the time that now appear to have been false or misleading.
Defending Conspiracy Theorists
Take for example, the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) publications on COVID-19.
AEI fanned the flames of a conspiracy theory that claims COVID-19 was developed for biological warfare.
AEI resident scholar Michael Rubin published a piece titled, “Was coronavirus a bioweapon? We don’t know, but history shows we can’t trust China.”
The article defended Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for his Fox News interview circulating the theory.
Roger Bate, an AEI visiting scholar, also penned a January 29 piece headlined, “The media is driving the overreaction to the coronavirus.”
The piece argues against action on COVID-19, without citing any evidence about the virus itself, but instead based on characterizations and generalizations. “I’ve seen several news reports essentially implying that, even if quarantining travelers or imposing travel bans to China are overreactions to the risk of the coronavirus, this is ok because it’s better to be safe than sorry,” he wrote. “Companies are so fearful of negative press that they seem to base much of their own rhetoric on what the media and liberal elites demand. While some of this is arguably harmless — note much of the hot air at Davos about climate change — when it becomes corporate policy and is echoed by government policy, it then has real consequences.”
“A contagion will happen at some point, and it’s important we recognize it and react,” he added.
“Unless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous,” he concluded, “this isn’t it.”
To be sure, there was not a visible consensus on those views within AEI. That same day, another AEI fellow published an article calling the coronavirus a “big economic deal,” citing its impact on China’s economy. And a three-paragraph AEI post later labeled claims that COVID-19 is a bioweapon “fake news.”
Those other pieces, however, do not undo any impacts from AEI publishing claims that proved to be baseless.
Reading Comprehension
Other times, articles downplaying the risks from COVID-19, penned by organizations that have adopted climate-science denying stances, present arguments laced with logical fallacies.
In some cases, it’s not clear whether the authors understood the comments they were critiquing.
Take, for instance, the Cato Institute’s March 4, 2020 column on “COVID-19 Deaths and Incredible WHO Estimates.” That piece attacks a statement by the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-?19 cases have died.”
Cato’s column labeled that statistic “sensationalist nonsense.” The number doesn’t take into account the fact that mild cases are more likely to go unreported, Cato’s Alan Reynolds wrote.
That, of course, is exactly why Dr. Adhanom included the word “reported” in his description of the statistic. There’s no ball being hidden here. And in case readers missed that word and its importance, The Times’ report included an explanation of that precise context. (“But the figure came loaded with caveats,” The Times wrote. “Experts, including those at the WHO, say that when more is known about the epidemic, the death rate will be considerably lower.”)
One day later, President Trump took a similar tack to Cato’s, calling the 3.4 precent statistic “really a false number.”
“Now, this is just a hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this,” Trump added.
It’s not clear where exactly Trump picked up his impression — but then of course, Trump has his own well-known stance on climate science.
'Not Even Close'
The author of the ACSH piece claiming that coronavirus is “not even close” to as bad as the flu was Dr. Alex Berezow — a PhD in microbiology, according to his bio, not a medical doctor. Berezow has been interviewed about coronavirus precautions by the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Insider, and Yahoo News.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/why-sanctions-against-iran-and-venezuela-during-a-pandemic-are-cruel/
no lnx
Why sanctions against Iran and Venezuela during a pandemic are cruel
President Donald J. Trump signs an Executive Order to place further sanctions on Iran Monday, June 24, 2019, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Written by Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada / Independent Media Institute March 16, 2020
Swiftly moves the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), dashing across continents, skipping over oceans, terrifying populations in every country. The numbers of those infected rises, as do the numbers of those who have died. Hands are being washed, tests are being done, and social distance has become a new phrase. It is unclear how devastating this pandemic will be.
In the midst of a pandemic, one would expect that all countries would collaborate in every way to mitigate the spread of the virus and its impact on human society. One would expect that a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude would provide the opportunity to suspend or end all inhumane economic sanctions and political blockades against certain countries. The main point here is this: Is this not the time for the imperialist bloc, led by the United States of America, to end the sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and a series of other countries?
Medical Shortages
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza told us recently that the “illegal and unilateral coercive measures that the United States has imposed on Venezuela are a form of collective punishment.” The use of the phrase “collective punishment” is significant; under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, any policy that inflicts damage on an entire population is a war crime. The U.S. policy, Arreaza told us, has “resulted in difficulties for the timely acquisition of medicines.”
On paper, the unilateral U.S. sanctions say that medical supplies are exempt. But this is an illusion. Neither Venezuela nor Iran can easily buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport it into their countries, nor can they use them in their largely public sector health systems. The embargo against these countries—in this time of COVID-19—is not only a war crime by the standards of the Geneva Conventions (1949) but is a crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations International Law Commission (1947).
In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump enacted tight restrictions on Venezuela’s ability to access financial markets; two years later, the U.S. government blacklisted Venezuela’s Central Bank and put a general embargo against the Venezuelan state institutions. If any firm trades with Venezuela’s public sector, it could face secondary sanctions.The U.S. Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) in 2017, which tightened sanctions against Iran, Russia, and North Korea. The next year, Trump imposed a raft of new sanctions against Iran which suffocated Iran’s economy. Once more, access to the world banking system and threats to companies that traded with Iran made it almost impossible for Iran to do business with the world.
In particular, the U.S. government made it clear that any business with the public sector of Iran and Venezuela was forbidden. The health infrastructure that provides for the mass of the populations in both Iran and Venezuela is run by the State, which means it faces disproportionate difficulty in accessing equipment and supplies, including testing kits and medicines.
Breaking the Embargo
Arreaza, the Venezuelan foreign minister, told us that his government is alert to the dangers of COVID-19 with a health infrastructure that has been affected by the sanctions. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez is leading a presidential commission to manage whatever resources are available. “We are breaking the blockade,” Arreaza said, “through the World Health Organization, through which we have obtained medicine and the tests to detect the illness.” The WHO, despite its own crisis of funds, has played a key role in both Venezuela and Iran.
Nonetheless, the WHO faces its own challenges with sanctions, particularly when it comes to transportation. These harsh sanctions forced transportation companies to reconsider servicing both Iran and Venezuela. Some airlines stopped flying there; many shipping companies decided not to anger Washington. When the World Health Organization tried to get testing kits for COVID-19 from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into Iran, it faced difficulty—as the WHO’s Christoph Hamelmann put it—“due to flight restrictions”; the UAE sent the equipment via a military transport plane.
Likewise, Arreaza told us, Venezuela has “received the solidarity from governments of countries such as China and Cuba.” This is a key issue. China, despite its own challenges from COVID-19, has been supplying testing kits and medical equipment to Iran and to Venezuela; it was China’s vigorous reaction to the virus that has now slowed down its spread within China itself. In late February, a team from the Red Cross Society of China arrived in Tehran to exchange information with the Iranian Red Cross and with WHO officials; China also donated testing kits and supplies. The sanctions, Chinese officials told us, should be of no consequence during a humanitarian crisis such as this; they are not going to honor them.
Meanwhile, the Iranians developed an app to help their population during the COVID-19 outbreak; Google decided to remove it from its app store, a consequence of the U.S. sanctions.
End the Sanctions
Yolimar Mejías Escorcha, an industrial engineer, tells us that the sanctions regime has put a lot of pressure on everyday life in Venezuela. She says that the government “continues to make an effort to ensure that people who most need it get health care, education, and food.” The opposition has tried to say that the crisis is a consequence of the government’s inefficiency rather than a result of the imperialist blockade on Venezuela. On March 6, she tells us, a new campaign was launched in the country called “Sanctions Are a Crime.” She hopes that this campaign will explain clearly to people why there are shortages in her country—the sanctions being the core reason.
In 2019, a group of countries met at the United Nations in New York to discuss the U.S. unilateral sanctions that violated the UN Charter. The intent was to work through the Non-Aligned Movement to create a formal group that would respond to these sanctions. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Arreaza told us that Venezuela supports this initiative but also the declaration of principles drafted by Iran against unilateralism and the Russian formal complaint about denial of visas for officials to visit the UN building in New York. “We hope to resume meetings this year once the difficulties presented by COVID-19 are overcome,” he said. They want to meet again, Arreaza said, to “advance joint, concrete actions.”
What Arreaza told us are initiatives at the interstate level. At the same time, there are ongoing initiatives led by popular movements and political organizations. In November 2019, an anti-imperialist solidarity meeting was held in Havana, Cuba, with representatives from 86 countries. At this meeting, it was decided that attention must be focused on the inhumane use of power in our time; a call was sent out to hold a week of anti-imperialist struggle between May 25 and May 31. The aim of the week is to alert the world’s public about imperialism and—in this context—about the murderous sanctions regime driven by the United States, more murderous in this time of COVID-19.
The question that a week of activities such as this poses is quite simple: What kind of moral fiber holds together an international system where a handful of countries can act in a way that goes against all the highest aspirations of humanity? When the United States continues its embargos against more than 50 countries—but mostly against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela—when there is a global pandemic afoot, what does this say about the nature of power and authority in our world? Sensitive people should be offended by such behavior, its mean-spiritedness evident in the unnatural deaths that it provokes. When the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the half-million Iraqi children who died because of U.S. sanctions, she said that those deaths were a price worth paying. They were certainly not a price that the Iraqis wanted to pay, nor now the Iranians or the Venezuelans, or indeed the majority of humankind. We march in May against this desiccated worldview; we march for humanity.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017).
Paola Estrada is in the Secretariat of the International Peoples Assembly and is a member of the Brazilian chapter of ALBA Movements (Continental Coordination of Social Movements toward the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America).
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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bizarro?
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lamar
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-lawmakers-whether-epa-staff-influenced-glyphosate-review-194036039.html?ref=gs
U.S. lawmakers probe EPA staff over possible bias in herbicide review
June 7, 2016
yahoo news oddly void on names: REUters
what's wrong w/ EPA infl WHO?!
By P.J. Huffstutter
CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers are investigating whether U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staff influenced the World Health Organization's review of glyphosate and its finding that the herbicide probably causes cancer, according to a letter sent to the agency on Tuesday.
The letter from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology is part of an ongoing investigation into the agency after the EPA posted and withdrew an internal report that said glyphosate was not cancer causing.
One question that lawmakers are trying to answer, according to legislative sources, is whether EPA staff allowed personal bias to color the agency's scientific review of glyphosate, the chemical in Monsanto Co's Roundup herbicide.
Some EPA staff participated in both the U.S. review and the WHO review. While the committee's line of investigation was not clear, lawmakers cited the contradictory findings of the two reviews.
Those reviews were by the EPA's cancer assessment review committee or CARC and the WHO's cancer arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer or IARC.
“Given the apparent contradictions of the CARC and IARC findings for glyphosate ..., the committee has concerns about the integrity" of the WHO review, the role of EPA officials in that review and their influence on the outcome of the EPA study, the committee's letter to the EPA seen by Reuters said.
According to the letter, lawmakers want congressional staff to interview four top EPA officials who were involved in one or both reviews of glyphosate.
An EPA spokeswoman said Tuesday the agency had received the letter, was reviewing it and would respond.
In an earlier letter EPA sent to the committee, the agency said that publishing the cancer assessment review committee's report was an accident and that the cancer review was still ongoing.
The EPA said it was "currently reviewing our standard operating procedures for the release of documents to avoid the inadvertent release of pre-decisional information in the future."
The congressional committee began its investigation into the EPA last month after the report by the EPA's cancer assessment review committee became briefly public.
The report found that glyphosate was "not likely" to be carcinogenic to humans. It also appeared to dispute the IARC report and questioned its analysis.
The WHO's IARC last year classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans."
The House's Agriculture Committee previously said it too was examining the agency's review of glyphosate and atrazine, another chemical used in agricultural herbicides.
The Agriculture Committee also wanted to know what steps still needed to be taken to finalize and issue the glyphosate report, which it had expected in July 2015.
(Reporting By P.J. Huffstutter; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Cynthia Osterman)
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http://ecowatch.com/2015/06/16/france-bans-monsantos-roundup-as-environmental-groups-push-who-for-stronger-safety-standards/
Monsanto, which manufactures the glyphosate weedkiller Roundup, reacted furiously to areport released earlier this year by the World Health Organization (WHO) that glyphosate likely causes cancer. The company demanded that WHO retract the report, repudiating the years of research by multiple scientists. With Roundup the most widely used and top-selling herbicide, Monsanto clearly has a bottom line to protect.
That bottom line has just taken another hit. In Europe, where people are far more suspicious of the extravagant claims and potential dangers of GMOs than in the U.S. and heavily regulates them, the French government has announced this week that it is restricting the sale of glyphosate weedkillers in garden centers.
“France must be on the offensive with regards to the banning of pesticides,” said ecology minister Ségolène Royal. “I have asked garden centers to stop putting Monsanto’s Roundup on sale.”
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http://www.who.int/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization
World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) that is concerned with international public health. It was established on 7 April 1948, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. WHO is a member of the United Nations Development Group. Its predecessor, the Health Organization, was an agency of theLeague of Nations. The constitution of the World Health Organization had been signed by 61 countries on 22 July 1946, with the first meeting of the World Health Assemblyfinishing on 24 July 1948. It incorporated the Office International d'Hygiène Publique and the League of Nations Health Organization. Since its creation, it has played a leading role in the eradication of smallpox. Its current priorities include communicable diseases, in particular, HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis; the mitigation of the effects of non-communicable diseases; sexual and reproductive health, development, and aging; nutrition, food security and healthy eating; occupational health; substance abuse; and drive the development of reporting, publications, and networking. WHO is responsible for the World Health Report, a leading international publication on health, the worldwide World Health Survey, and World Health Day (7 April of every year).
Contents
- 1 History
- 2 Structure
- 3 Controversies
- 4 World headquarters
- 5 See also
- 6 References
- 7 External links
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Diet and sugar intake:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:
Some of the research undertaken or supported by WHO to determine how people's lifestyles and environments are influencing whether they live in better or worse health can be controversial, as illustrated by a 2003 joint WHO/FAO report on nutrition and the prevention of chronic non-communicable disease,[104] which recommended that sugar should form no more than 10% of a healthy diet. This report led to lobbying by the sugar industry against the recommendation, to which the WHO/FAO responded by including in the report the statement "The Consultation recognized that a population goal for free sugars of less than 10% of total energy is controversial", but also stood by its recommendation based upon its own analysis of scientific studies.[105] In 2014, WHO reduced recommended sugar levels by half, saying that sugar should make up no more than 5% of a healthy diet.[106]
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Main article: 2009 flu pandemic
In 2007, the WHO organized work on pandemic influenza vaccine development through clinical trials in collaboration with many experts. A pandemic involving the H1N1 influenza virus was declared by Director-GeneralMargaret Chan in April 2009.
By the post-pandemic period critics claimed the WHO had exaggerated the danger, spreading "fear and confusion" rather than "immediate information".[107] Industry experts countered that the 2009 pandemic had led to "unprecedented collaboration between global health authorities, scientists and manufacturers, resulting in the most comprehensive pandemic response ever undertaken, with a number of vaccines approved for use three months after the pandemic declaration. This response was only possible because of the extensive preparations undertaken in during the last decade".[108]
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http://ecowatch.com/2014/10/15/walmart-walton-renewable-energy
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The report, How The Walton Family Is Threatening Our Clean Energy Future, resolves the contradiction by pointing to the multibillionaires’ main motivation: profit.
According to the report, “The Walton family—majority owners of Walmart—are impeding America’s transition to a clean energy future. At a time when more than 500,000 households and businesses are generating their own solar electricity, and the U.S. solar industry is employing 143,000 people, the Waltons are funding nearly two dozen organizations working to roll back renewable energy policies, while a Walton-owned company is pushing for regulations aimed at hindering the growth of rooftop solar power.”
As solar energy generation has spread across the country, traditional fossil fuel-based utilities have been campaigning to weaken state policies that encourage the growth of clean energy, including solar. They’ve especially taken aim at anything that would bolster the spread of rooftop solar installations, which threatens their profits. They’ve been backed by anti-environment groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity and American Enterprise Institute. The Waltons have donated more than $4.5 million to more than 20 such groups, including all three of those. The study also found that the bulk of Walmart’s and the Waltons’ contributions to individual politicians favor those who oppose legislation reducing energy pollution to address climate change.
The anti-renewables groups have had some successes in rolling back the energy future in Ohio and Arizona. Arizona, for instance, gave the state’s largest utility, APS, the right to :{charge a fee}:to homes with rooftop solar. Since then, according to the ILSO study, rooftop solar installations are declining, and so is the number of jobs in the solar industry.
What’s Walmart’s dog in this fight? Let the report explain:
“A Walton-owned solar company, First Solar, was instrumental in helping APS win in Arizona, backing the utility even as the rest of the solar industry joined environmental and consumer groups in opposing the new fees. First Solar builds solar arrays for utilities and, as such, stands to benefit if households are blocked from generating their own electricity, even if it means slowing the overall growth of solar.”
First Solar instigated a proceeding at the World Health Organization that could force several states to repeal solar incentives that encourage job creation there. First Solar does most of its manufacturing in Malaysia, minimizing its contribution to U.S. job creation.
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