On the W.H.O.

(Letter)

21 March 2020

Dear Comrades,

The quote from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) in our article “China Mobilizes to Contain Coronavirus” (WV No. 1171, 6 March) does an excellent job of showing the success of China’s collectivized and planned economy. However, the article did not expose the class nature of the W.H.O. Instead, the article presents the W.H.O. as a neutral organization, or even an organization that should be promoted since it’s praising China. While keeping what we say about the W.H.O. in the article, we should not let readers have illusions in it. The W.H.O. is not neutral. It is part of the UN, which serves as a “democratic” shell for the imperialists, centrally the U.S. The largest financial contributors to the W.H.O. are the U.S. government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The W.H.O. was established in April 1948. The Soviet Union and the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics withdrew from the organization in 1949. The deformed workers states of Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary soon followed suit, angry with the W.H.O.’s response to the U.S. withholding medical resources from East Europe (the U.S. refused to export crucial equipment for manufacturing penicillin to Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia).

In 1954, in a speech celebrating the W.H.O., a U.S. capitalist politician summed up U.S. imperialism’s support for this organization when she declared, “In our global struggle against communism, one of our principal endeavors is to keep the free world strong. Disease breeds poverty and poverty breeds further disease. International communism thrives on both.”

Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the W.H.O. and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abetted the UN’s attempt to cover up that UN “peacekeeping” troops were the source of the massive cholera epidemic in Haiti. A 2013 W.H.O. report also covered up the impact of the U.S. imperialists’ depleted uranium munitions on congenital birth defects in Iraq.

Comradely,
J.