There is very little reason to listen to the World Health Organization ever again. Ever.

Its functionaries aren't just bootlicking tankies running cover for the Chinese dictatorship in the facile hopes of some greater good. The WHO has gone beyond even that disgrace, debasing itself for the Chinese Communist Party while spreading utter junk science. In just two months, this organization has permanently discredited itself and has no more credibility to lose.

The WHO's dictatorial sycophancy long predates the coronavirus. Beijing's stranglehold over the organization began in earnest in 2006, when its hand-picked candidate won the election to become the WHO's director-general. When Margaret Chan, herself a Chinese national, took charge of the organization, so did the interests of the communist party.

Chan notoriously praised the North Korean healthcare system as the "envy" of "other developing countries" less than a decade after her predecessor, Gro Harlem Brundtland, claimed it was on the brink of collapse. Chan also allied the WHO with Bashar Assad, declaring the Syrian dictator "a president who is working for his people and his country" just a few years before he was caught red-handed massacring his own people. Syria also strong-armed the WHO into silencing a positive report about Israeli health conditions. Soon before leaving her post, Chan barred Taiwan, already limited to participating in WHO meetings solely as an observer, from the WHO's annual assembly. Before leaving, Chan brought Xi Jinping to the WHO headquarters, the first such visit by any Chinese dictator.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Chan's successor and current WHO director-general, is not from China, but he is no less a puppet of the regime and friend to dictators. The Chinese Communist Party, the third-largest financial contributor to the WHO, backed the Ethiopian's electoral bid, and it has certainly gotten its money's worth in the current crisis.

Tedros appointed Robert Mugabe a goodwill ambassador of the WHO in 2017, just a month before the Zimbabwean dictator was sacked as the result of a military coup. Zimbabweans' average life expectancy is nearly two decades shorter than that of Americans, and the socialist government routinely cannot pay its doctors, who are forced to perform surgeries without gloves and use rope instead of bandages. The WHO revoked the appointment only after global backlash.

In 2019, the WHO authorized the inclusion of an entire chapter on traditional Chinese medicine (that is, unscientific superstition) in the latest version of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.

"To include TCM in the ICD is an egregious lapse in evidence-based thinking and practice," Scientific American wrote of the move. "Data supporting the effectiveness of most traditional remedies are scant, at best."

Then came the coronavirus.

In January, Tedros met with Xi in Beijing, where the WHO director-general lavished praise upon the Chinese dictator for his "transparency" and handling of the matter.

"We appreciate the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated," Tedros said a month after Beijing had already lied to the world that the coronavirus couldn't spread from human to human and allowed 7 million people, an untold number of them infected, to leave Wuhan and travel who even knows where.

In February, Tedros lambasted the United States and other nations for taking the sensible step of banning travel from China. He claimed there was "no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade." He then lauded China for "making us safer," pushing back on a European journalist asking if Beijing put "pressure" on the organization to give it such "effusive praise."

Despite clear evidence that the coronavirus would shut down the global economy, the WHO declined to deem it a pandemic until March 11, when already over 100,000 cases had been confirmed worldwide. Shortly thereafter, WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward pretended not to hear a question from journalist Yvonne Tong about reconsidering the WHO's Taiwan ban and hung up the video call. When he called back, Tong reiterated her question.

"Well, we've already talked about China," he responded shortly before ending the interview for good.

All the while, the WHO has continued to claim, falsely, that masks do not protect people from the coronavirus, even though studies indicate that surgical masks are 90% effective, tea towels are 72% effective, and cotton T-shirts are 50% effective against bacteria one-fifth the size of the coronavirus.

A possible explanation? To save more masks for China, which has exported faulty ones to the rest of the planet and not only hoarded its own but also raided those of other countries.

The U.S. contributes $115.4 million to the WHO, more than any other nation and nearly three times as much as China. After the coronavirus crisis wanes, hundreds of thousands of American lives lost and millions unemployed, it'll be well worth asking why and whether it's still worth it.