China will give the World Health Organization $500 million, but “in terms of the contribution, the WHO is a cheap date,” Brett Schaefer says.
“The Chinese donation is reportedly $500 million over five years,” Schaefer, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Signal. “According to U.N. Chief Executives Board data, in 2023, the U.S. provided $374 million in voluntary contributions above its $113 million in assessed contributions.”
China will now be the largest donor to the World Health Organization after President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the WHO in January, citing concerns over its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and failure to implement reforms.
“The world is now facing the impacts of unilateralism and power politics, bringing major challenges to global health security,” Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong told the World Health Assembly on Tuesday in the announcement of China’s pledge to the WHO.
“China strongly believes that only with solidarity and mutual assistance can we create a healthy world together,” the Chinese official said.
Beijing’s influence in the WHO is not new, according to Schaefer, an expert on the United Nations and international organizations.
“Based on the effort that the WHO made to excuse China’s lack of transparency and cooperation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the organization’s unwillingness to press China about the increasing evidence that the disease originated from a lab leak, it is hard to conclude that the WHO is not already compromised by Chinese influence,” he said.
While it is in the U.S. interest to support global health, there are other methods for doing so, outside of the World Health Organization, Schaefer said, adding that it could have adopted reforms to maintain U.S. involvement, but chose instead to “resist reform and settle for far less in Chinese support.”
When the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO was announced, the White House said that it had continued to “demand unfairly onerous payments” from the U.S., especially when the amount the U.S. paid was compared to China’s contribution.
“China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300% of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO,” the White House said in January.
Robert Moffit, a senior research fellow in the Center for Health and Welfare Policy at The Heritage Foundation, says it’s unclear whether China’s financial pledge will change anything at the WHO.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO failed miserably in its mission to try and keep the world safe. As congressional investigators proved, it caved to communist China at the very inception of the pandemic,” Moffit told The Daily Signal.
Instead of relying on the WHO, America—along with our friends and allies—needs to create an alternative and reliable international health monitoring system, sooner rather than later,” Moffit said.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
