 Hello and welcome to Newsclick and today we're going to be talking about the US government's decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization. Now this decision was notified to Congress on Tuesday and is a one-year long process and if it is not reversed the US could leave the WHO by July 6 next year. Now this has raised a lot of questions especially regarding the funding of the World Health Organization. The US is the single largest contributor giving around at least 14% of its budget. It also has a huge amount it has to pay to the World Health Organization. Latest numbers are around a hundred million dollars and a hundred billion Swiss francs that it goes to the WHO. So we have Praveen Purghasa to talk about some of these issues. So Praveen could we first start by looking at some of the numbers involved especially around the budgets and the finances. What is likely to be the impact on the WHO and why is it significant? Well WHO has been the only organization that we have globally in which all countries can contribute to fight pandemics and let's understand there is no institution globally which exists apart from WHO to jointly fight pandemics because pandemics are not limited to a country. Unfortunately for those who believe in nationalism of this kind my country before everybody else in the world they seem to forget that they other countries may recognize both borders but unfortunately the microbes don't. So therefore pandemics are a threat to all the people in the world and if we do not have a coordinated international body which can help fight it then we are really going to be in much deeper waters than we are today. So effectively what the US is doing is in trying to dismember all international platforms whether it's the WTO earlier it's the UNESCO even earlier than that all the international agreements that they have signed the Kyoto protocols to the Paris Agreement all of which they're not a party to and they have withdrawn whatever they were a party to. So given all of that this is a long series of what would be called US exceptionalism to dispense with the global structure in the belief they don't need anybody else and therefore they're okay and why should they pay anybody else for global coordination all they have to do is keep themselves safe. Now pandemic has shown that this doesn't work coronavirus is the novel coronavirus for SARS-CoV-2 which is the cause of the COVID-19 disease is clearly shown that the US failed badly in trying to handle this pandemic. Now it needs to blame somebody and particularly Trump as his niece's detail in her latest book is essentially a narcissistic figure so somebody has to pay can't certainly be him for his complete disaster of handling of the pandemic in the United States and somebody needs to be made the scapegoat China being one and WTO WTO being gathered. So the question that arises is you talked about WTO's budget so let's look at WTO's budget it's a very small budget for the task they have been given if you want to fight global pandemic with the budget that's that small that itself shows the enormity of the work the WTO has done because this is equal to the budget of say one Johns Hopkins public health institution in the United States it's one tenth the budget of CDC or the National Institute of Health in the United States so these are really not big budgets at all for the task which has been given that not only generate health policies globally create structures to fight pandemics and provide a whole bunch of other things so I think that expectation that WTO having not succeeded in fighting the pandemic is a bogus understanding because WTO doesn't fight pandemics by itself it fights pandemics in coordination with the countries and in fact it has no sovereign no rights over any country it can only advise each country sovereign and carries out its own policies so effectively asking WTO to stop pandemics is a bogus understanding was WTO coordinating and answer is yes it has coordinated in fighting against Ebola just imagine if an Ebola pandemic had broken out what it would do to the world and in even in COVID-19 it has been the tripwire that existed warned people January end of January itself this pandemic is going to hit us in fact the they had said clearly that this is going to become a pandemic and if we did not heed that warning if the United States didn't heed that warning that's to the count of Mr. Trump and United States so this is the complete bogus argument that the US is now trying to give that China didn't tell us though China CDC of China informed CDC United States on the 3rd of January so they had at least two and a half to three months to prepare for the pandemic which hit them and ultimately hit them from Europe it didn't hit them from China so this are the essentially the best things that are there but I would like to take you to what's the other issue of the pandemic really is the pandemic that was expected which is still expected is a huge at some point of time flu similar to the 1980s epidemic and there are enough flu strains going around which seem to be quite dangerous versions of swine avian flues and as we know the reassortment of these they take this continuously that all of this can lead to a of a pandemic which will be much more serious than the swine flu pandemic which started from North America or what other pandemics we have seen for the last hundreds hundred years except except of course the biggie which is the 1918 flu pandemic now if we look at these our protection for flu is through what is called the flu vaccine at the moment 95 percent of the flu doses are used in the United States Europe and Western Pacific which also covers China and Australia US uses the largest amount of it five percent is used in Africa what's called Eastern Mediterranean which is really Asian part of the Mediterranean ocean and then South Southeast Asia which is really rest of the world which is 50 percent of the global population this particular system which needs to then create the flu vaccines are most useful for the United States but who creates the flu vaccine this is done by a WHO coordinated program which gets all the parties in the world together and this is called the GIS RS program I'll talk about what this is just in a little while this is gets from different places what are the flu virus samples that exist gets it in one place then the meet and decide which is this flu vaccine for this season that must be prepared and the beat this twice and do it twice a year basically because of southern and northern hemisphere now this program is across different institutions in the world there are WHO collaborating centers which are really the key institutions there but the whole bunch of other centers which collect virus sent to WHO and is essential for collecting all the information that it has worldwide now in 2017 for which WHO has shared the data in 2017 alone they collected three and a half million specimens 40,000 virus specimens were shared with WHO from different countries 110 countries 10,000 viruses were characterized by WHO centers and 45 candidate vaccine viruses developed for development of the vaccine so 45 candidate candidate vaccines were developed under WHO and these were the ones then which went into production and which were used by different countries now this entire system operates based on the fact that twice a year the experts meet in WHO headquarters and based on this data which we talked about they could decide what is to be used for vaccination and as I said the US is the country which uses the maximum number of flu vaccines in the world and if the US didn't have this information it would really be flying blind this is what their experts themselves say now where does this why do countries share this virus samples this is a very big issue because if you share virus samples you are basically sharing genetic material for which if you go back to the companies which produce a vaccine you might have to pay high cost and typically for a lot of the countries the cost is high given the per capita income of their countries so something like 20 dollars a flu shot which may not seem exorbitant if you are in the western western Europe or in Europe or United States is a quite a huge cost if it comes to large parts of Africa and if you do it every year or even in South Asia but large parts of the population this high cost now this is why they had countries have been saying okay we are sharing with WHO and there is no other institution that today exists for sharing this uh flu viruses and who can we share the virus but what about share it returns to us can we get access to chief vaccine now that's the debate which is going on so I'm going to lead that out but what I'm focusing on is why do countries share the virus specimens they have because they expect that the vaccine will help them now if this is going to help the United States who is not a party to WHO and it will not help others because they are going to separate from WHO anyway they're not going to even support WHO with their contributions the question is it becomes a completely one-sided relationship and that's what the US is saying I will take from you but I'll give nothing in return now the reason that the US pays the highest share it has the highest income in the world as a country it doesn't give it out of love for say public health in the world it gives it out of the fact that this was the principle decided for the UN what will be the share of each country and that's what US gives after that it gives money for those programs which is think it's important for it for its own protection for its own reasons they give a certain amount of money for instance they did give a certain amount of grains because it was coming back to hit them initially they thought it was something in Africa it came back if again initially they thought it is you know amongst only a certain section of the population and because there are a lot of homophobic senior officials in the United States they thought this is not of concern to the general population when it become a something which hit everybody or it had the potential to hit everybody then of course they made a certain amount of contribution even the WHO budget of the AIDS programs and so on so these are issues which the WHO has been useful not only for third world countries as the United States seems to think but for itself now the question is is there any other mechanism which can be used now I would finally end with the most important point in the current pandemic that if you remember while the Chinese had informed WHO on December 30 or 31st and informed the United States on January 3rd they had the genome sequence which had gone to Gene Bank now Gene Bank Bank is a part of the United States national repository so the Chinese had actually uploaded the gene bank gene bank hadn't put it up till 12 January 12th we don't know why this is still at the moment not clear to us maybe the Chinese had embargoed pending a publication or it is possible that they just went going through their own internal procedures before they were uploaded then the Chinese uploaded again to a basically a global genomic data bank which is I think GIS ID just have a quick look at what that is this this is the other gene bank which is there which is basically the platform for flu viruses this was set up by a whole bunch of public trusts and other agencies and make coordinates with WHO for the virus samples and so on but the basic sharing of the genome which has become the primary way to share virus data is in this global data bank which has put up in 2000 which has put up in January 12th now the question is on January 11th the question is if we don't have platforms for doing this what would we call public science how do we actually do public health and if we do not do public health then unfortunately for the globe pandemics will then hit us harder every time a new pandemic breaks breaks upon us breaks through as it were it's going to hit us very hard now experts are still talking about that this is not the big one the big one is still to come and they think a variant of avian flu variant of avian plus fine flu is going to become much harder and if that happens we might see deaths on a much higher scale so this trip wire mechanism which is what the WHO runs is our only protection against such pandemic and it is unfortunate that the united states has made WHO the scapegoat for its own failure absolutely and the other key issue of course is the fact that when it comes to countries there is a concept of assist contributions which are mandatory versus which voluntary and once a country like the US withdraws what it opens up the space for is for private interest to have a much larger say in the WHO because of the amount that in particular well that's already happened because of the dwindling share of the budget in WHO that is not really increasing compared to the kind of tasks it is supposed to meet and the fact that the US doesn't really give its full share it promises and generally is a laggard it's even now in default for major payments to the WHO and that's one of the conditions that they can only leave after that's cleared the dues and I think they have what 100 million odd dollars of dues spending with WHO at the moment so what's happened it will have already happened is private funding agencies private funds like Bill and Belinda Gates foundation have already started making up a major share of the WHO's budget what it does is they go to specific programs and those specific programs cannot be then under the democratic control of the countries it effectively is the donor who decides what funding will happen and then WHO becomes quasi NGO looking for funds and if it looks for funds then it will go to those donors who have the money and they will dictate what are the programs that WHO must follow so this has already been there the WHO was being co-opted in some sense by the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation and other such foundation so it hasn't taken up the patent issue as sharply as we would have wanted it to because what they've done is for what is called a patent fool and a common patent fool which is what the Bill Belinda Gates foundations and other foundations welcome foundation various other foundations I've been talking about plus backed by of course the countries like the rich countries like Germany France and others which in fact in this pandemic may still get us a cheap vaccine it's possible we're not sure if the US become successful and it has the only vaccine which is useful in that case we need to really worry like we have seen for every discipline what happens but the basic issue is that even that in a pandemic why should that be why should we not declare that all countries support that there should be no patent rights there should be no intellectual property rights on vaccines and medicines on this particular pandemic so that is something which would have been a much more fitting reply but even the common patent fool is what the US doesn't agree to but what happens is the policies of WHO then become dictated by funders as you say and it is that they are not then going to ask for easy access no patent policies for even under pandemics but then agree to what Bill and Melinda Gates foundation will be saying and that is unfortunately what is going to happen even more once the United States pulls out of it because yes it's it's going to leave a four hundred billion dollar gap in their biannual budget so this is already 200 million dollar gap in their annual budget so this is something that is going to be of a great deal of concern and yes I think what the United States is doing and this is something it has done for every now international organization that either sink it or make it completely subservient to what his own interests are and their own interests are clearly that of intellectual property rights being the instrument for their global dominance and this is something which they are they have been very clear about for a long long time this is what the WHO trips agreement was all about really thank you so much for talking to us that's all your time for today keep watching