Alternative title II: Today I learned that the average FT Alphaville commentator is smarter than the average commentator at the mother ship newspaper.
Regarding the first alt-title, it was known at the time Tedros, PhD won the almost two-year campaign to succeed China's Dr. Margaret Chan as Director-General that Tedros (he prefers to go by his first name) had covered up three epidemics in Ethiopia, cholera, nasty stuff. (NYT)
Regarding the second alt-title, comparison/contrast of the comments on the two platforms reveals the authors of the first two comments in the paper self-identifying as morons:
Who politicised it? The US. Why? Because it's a convenient scapegoat. Supranational bodies are at the sitting ducks for cynical populism....And:
Izabella makes a huge claim in her opening paragraph about how the WHO is politicised, presents absolutely no evidence to prove this, spends the next few paragraphs not on expounding her position but on a weird historical overview of the WHO's predecessor with bizarre analogies to Nazi Germany and the Rockefeller Foundation, and at the end throws in a weird brief conclusion about how the WHO is, in her unsubstantiated opinion, not fit for purpose.The last comment when I looked was a perfect bookend to the first two:
A terrible undergraduate essay that would barely scrape a 2:2 for not answering the question or at least backing up the student's personal opinions with some evidence and facts.
Does the FT even screen articles before publishing them? Reading this article seems to indicate that such quality screening does not happen.
In this week’s column I explored whether the World Health Organization has become too politicised an agency to lead the world’s information and diagnostic response to the Covid-19 pandemic.....MUCH MORE including the video.
The politicisation, I argued, was an indirect consequence of WHO’s funding structure, which -- whatever one’s political perspective -- compromises the agency’s neutrality and trustworthiness somewhere in the world. Those opposed to American influence, for example, are likely troubled by the organisation’s dependence on US funding, both governmental and private. The threat of defunding (which has now materialised) is a key mechanism by which American national interests are seen as potentially prioritised.
What I didn’t get a chance to expand on is that the trust-compromising politicisation is broader and more multi-faceted than that. The WHO -- aware of its funding biases -- is ironically also seen by many as too slow to criticise or act against American rivals for fear of being deemed discriminatory. It thus sits in between a rock and hard place, damned if it does make judgments against American rivals and damned if it doesn’t.
Finally, its dependence on private foundation money sourced from one-time information monopolist Bill Gates -- however well-intended -- compromises its credibility with those who fear the crisis may be exploited to undermine their privacy and information autonomy, or to push forward some sinister profit-oriented “hidden agenda”....
The column in the paper:
The world needs a new, depoliticised WHO
We'll leave the last word to an FT Alphaville commenter
...Come on Izabella, you're one of the last hopes for the integrity and competence of mainstream journalism.
Of course it's political.
Arguing it is not is either political in itself or stupid.
And on to FT Alphaville:
AlphaVid: On trusting public health communications