Trump is right: the rotten World Health Organisation should be reformed or abolished

Remember when the World Health Organisation made Robert Mugabe its goodwill ambassador? I think about that a lot. We all make mistakes, but the decision to honour the butcher of Zimbabwe was so epically misjudged that there seemed to be only two possible explanations: either the WHO is fantastically corrupt or it is run by people who have lost their minds. Neither is a comforting thought when the organisation is charged with protecting the health of everybody on the planet.The WHO has been criticised for mishandling epidemics before, but its response to Covid-19 has been dangerously inept and often bizarre. In mid-January, approximately six weeks after the virus had been discovered in Wuhan, the WHO repeated the dishonest claim from the Chinese government that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. On 21 January, as countries outside China were reporting their first cases, the WHO retreated to its comfort zone and put out a long Twitter thread about the dangers of vaping, including pseudo-scientific claims about e-cigarette fluid burning people’s skin and secondhand vapour posing a mortal threat to bystanders.