WHO Are We Now?

Trump pulled us out of an international agreement as expected, continuing an American tradition of refusing to join the rest of the world in interdependent global endeavors that are perceived to threaten U.S. sovereignty and American big business.

No, I'm not talking about pulling us out of the agreement on fighting climate change, which he did to the sound of cheering supporters who no longer have to worry about giving up their F-150 pickup trucks.  I'm talking about the executive order Trump signed that pulls us out of the World Health Organization.

Trump originally did that in the final year of his first term - 2020, the year of the COVID pandemic - insisting that China was paying too little to support the World Health Organization based on its population and that the United States was paying too much, and that the World Health Organization is in need of serious reform.  (Biden canceled the pullout.)  He's done it again for the same reasons.  Now, I don't know how much of that is true, but it was quite obvious that the organization bungled the response to COVID and let the Chinese hoodwink everyone - including Trump himself - into thinking they were on top of it, as this BBC report explains, and so some sort of reform at the organization (I'm not referring to it as "the WHO," it sounds like I'm talking about a rock band, though Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus's capitulation to Chinese President Xi Jinping in the early days of the COVID crisis could be punningly described as  "The WHO Sell Out") is needed.  So, by that criterion, Trump's order makes sense.

Or it would if he hadn't chosen someone to lead the Department of Health and Human Services whose main qualification for the job was living through birth. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not a doctor but an environmental lawyer who should only be in Trump's White House to handle oil spills.  He opposes vaccines and is too skeptical toward pharmaceuticals without being skeptical enough toward pharmaceutical companies.  I sincerely hope that Senate Democrats oppose Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s confirmation to be Secretary of Health and Human Services with every fiber of their beings, but the lack of fiber Democrats have shown so far toward Trump Mark Two suggests that they tend to have too much Fruity Pebbles for breakfast and not enough Grape-Nuts.  In fact, kind of perversely, some Democratic U.S. Senators are interested in RFK Jr.'s attacks on Big Pharma and Big Agribusiness, and Cory Booker, New Jersey's senior senator, wants to learn more about Kennedy's ideas on improving the food supply.

Even if Kennedy gets us eating heathier food and has the Food and Drug Administration, an HHS agency, do something about additives like high fructose corn syrup, diseases still happen.  Eating wholly organic and natural foods didn't prevent the Black Plague in the Middle Ages.  By pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, Trump is incapacitating the international effort to control diseases and viruses - including the current bird flu wave - and making it more possible for another pandemic as bad as COVID to emerge. 

And then Kennedy will be fired.  Not for bungling the pandemic response, but for objecting to Trump's proposal to inject ourselves with cyanide or whatever.