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The vaudeville duo Abbott & Costello once popularized a comedic sketch about baseball where the names of two infielders – “Who” and “What” – created purposeful confusion, to the delight of crowds from the West Coast to the East.

Today, the “who” is the World Health Organization and the unlaughable commotion it has created around coronavirus, which is killing confidence as fast as the virus is eradicating humans. Purposely or not, by praising China’s response to a virus the WHO first denied and then lied about, this longtime paragon of public health is fueling a “China versus the world” showdown.

Against every shred of science, virology and common sense, China still claims the COVID-19 outbreak there was isolated to Wuhan, that while it ravages the rest of the planet, there hasn’t been a single case reported just down the road in its political and merchant centers, Shanghai and Beijing.

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China’s brazen conduct has been both calculated and purposeful, and the ascending clamor for investigation and punishment can’t come quickly enough for national economies that have been devastated, and innocent lives – including a newborn baby – that have been eliminated.

By enabling Chinese misconduct, the WHO has become the new poster child for international organizations so bloated with bureaucracy and punctuated by politics they’ve turned into something well beyond what they were intended to be.

Created within the United Nations in 1948 by Chinese diplomat Szeming Sze and (accused Russian spy) Alger Hiss, the WHO (in line with its predecessor, the International Sanitary Conference) was charged with monitoring and coordinating emergency response to global health threats without regard for race, gender or nationality. One world, no borders.

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After early successes confronting malaria, smallpox and polio, the WHO’s response to Ebola six years ago was tragically tardy (thousands died before the organization declared it an emergency) and its delay in sounding the alarm over the COVID-19 calamity (rejecting travel bans and its human-to-human transmission) is inexplicable.

Today, the WHO is led by the first non-doctor in its history, Ethiopia’s Tedros Adhanom, whose fealty to Marxism, and appointment of Robert Mugabe as his “goodwill ambassador” (the Zimbabwe zealot who ravaged his nation through corruption and crimes against humanity) are more than feckless footnotes to his public health career.

More troubling, under Tedros’ leadership, WHO is morphing from vox populi neutrality to a more combative defense of its policies, decisions and players. Instead of employing a more dispassionate, just-the-facts approach to its mission, WHO – like Tedros did when he won the directorship – is now campaigning to score points, as if public health is a game to be won by some over others.

Growing distrust of institutions, which already stops us from cooperating on the small stuff, has now infected initiatives needed to secure the world against challenges that honor no history or national border.

For the sake of the world, the WHO should quickly shed its defiant rhetoric and return to its original mission as the early-warning system for pandemics, epidemics and health scares, where information is shared openly, completely and without interpretive bias. If not, they must be replaced by an organization that will.

Globalist maven Henry Kissinger is already calling for a new post-pandemic world order based on “public trust,” but that’s the rub. How do you create enough trust to forge alliances of common interest across the globe when nationalism is on the rise, institutions are in decline and those who know what they’re talking about are left to watch from the sideline?

Growing distrust of institutions, which already stops us from cooperating on the small stuff, has now infected initiatives needed to secure the world against challenges that honor no history or national border. While respondents in a recent Gallup survey regarded doctors and scientists as the most trusted (94 percent and 86 percent, respectively), only 9 percent expressed any real trust in government, and by extension, any government organizations, to measure up.

More frighteningly for the indefatigable Dr. Anthony Fauci (and for all of us), the same Gallup survey revealed that one out of three Americans (and near majorities in France and Switzerland) feel life-saving vaccines are life-threatening, and they may resist using them when they become available.

In public health, the remedy begins by compelling the most important organizations to focus on what they know and do best while leaving behind the rest. For America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for example, that means issuing health-related travel alerts and disease transmission data, not dictating public policy on gun control (as the agency did in 2015).

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Similarly, the WHO (with or without Tedros) should return to its historical mission as the world’s “canary in the coal mine,” warning the world when danger is headed its way. If it does not, once the pandemic is in our rearview mirror, we should replace the WHO with an organization that will do so, and that will give the world not always what it wants to know, but what it needs to know.

Our survival depends on it. Literally.

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