After several years of enduring all of the ‘woke’ progressive conspiracy theories regarding President Trump, I had come to believe that their favorite recreational activity was to go to a museum that had a Jackson Pollock painting hanging on the wall, in order to stare at it for hours trying to connect the dots. It got to the point that I began to think that the ‘drip method’ was actually a term that described the people viewing the paintings, rather than a description of Pollock’s painting style.
At the risk of being guilty of the thing I’m denigrating (a favorite tactic of the left), I will attempt to connect some dots. Considering that I’ve been called far worse than a drip over the course of my lifetime, I consider this to be a fairly low-risk exercise.
A number of reporters, including some who write for Brownstone Journal have legitimately expressed concern that third-world countries would bear the brunt of the withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organization (WHO). Areas of concern include public health programs to address HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. I share these concerns, but I will now connect a few dots to see whether these concerns are overblown.
First, I’ll provide some context. The immediate justification for US withdrawal from the WHO relates to activities surrounding their corrupt and incompetent handling of the Covid pandemic response. However, it’s been fairly obvious that ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, he has viewed all multilateral agreements as a ruse to rip off the US for billions upon billions upon trillions of dollars. Other examples include the Paris Accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NATO, and former trade agreements with Mexico and Canada.
In some cases, the pacts were too costly to continue US participation, while others could be salvaged if negotiated by people who were looking out for America’s best interests. By any reasonable measure, Trump handled these matters fairly well during his first term and has earned the right to continue this process during his second term.
Getting back to WHO and the Covid response, one of the things that happened in Africa was that funds were diverted from HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria programs in order to give Covid jabs (I refuse to refer to these shots as a vaccine) to a population with a median age of 26. This was a double whammy in that funds were diverted from programs that had been helpful in order to provide a treatment that harmed and killed more people than would have occurred if nothing had been done. The WHO was a major player in implementing these policies. The results for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and Covid have been uniformly disastrous, and this doesn’t include the collateral damage that occurred, which may turn out to be even worse than the direct harms.