Pulling Out Of The World Health Organization Jeopardizes Lives And Threatens The Fight To End Polio
By David Ardam
Polio - short for Poliomyelitis - a crippling and potentially fatal disease, is caused by a virus that invades the nervous system and can cause paralysis in a matter of hours. The disease, spread by person-to-person contact, has been with us for thousands of years. It has struck fear into the hearts and minds of millions around the world (read the Phillip Roth novel Nemesis if you want to get a sense of that fear right here at home) and has no cure. We do, however, have two vaccines which are nearly 100% effective in preventing the virus from infecting someone and spreading. Developed by Drs. Salk and Sabin in the 1950’s, these vaccines have prevented millions of cases of polio and have immeasurably eased the fears of parents around the world.
In fact, the disease has not been seen in the United States in over 40 years. In the United States our public health infrastructure has been successful in getting almost universal compliance with polio vaccinations, and the last recorded case in the U.S. occurred in 1978. Not so with the rest of the world.
I have been a member of Rotary since 1983. Rotary is a service organization of 1.2 million exemplary people, with a mission of doing good in the world. Rotarians do not get paid to do service. They just do it. Their reward is simply the good feeling one gets out of making the world a better place. Just a couple of years after I joined, Rotary embarked on a quest to vaccinate the world with the polio vaccine, and to rid the planet of a terrible scourge.
Rotary was not alone in this venture. From the beginning, Rotary partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO), The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). More recently, that partnership – known as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) – has been expanded with the addition of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance. This partnership has been incredibly effective, reducing the number of worldwide cases from 350,000 per year (or about 1,000 per day) down to only 81, total, in 2020 as of this July 4th. And the number of countries affected by endemic polio has been reduced from 125 to only two (Pakistan and Afghanistan).
Results like this doesn’t just happen. It takes coordination, scientific expertise, cooperation of all stakeholders, and significant amounts of money to eradicate a crippling virus like polio. To date, the United States has been the biggest single contributor of financial resources to the effort. Until now.
Today the United States, under its present leadership in the White House, has announced that it is pulling out of the World Health Organization. That means, it will no longer be funding projects like polio eradication. And it is doing so just at a time when we are in a critical battle against Covid-19, another viral pandemic, a battle that is already drawing away significant resources from the quest to finish off polio for good. The danger is, if we drop our efforts against polio for too long, we will lose so much of the ground we’ve gained. Experts estimate that if we stop the polio eradication efforts now, the number of new cases will swell to 200,000 cases a year in just a few decades. In addition to lives crippled and lost, in 20 years we will lose an estimated $20-40 billion in economic benefits that come from eradicating the disease.
As noted by the WHO, Polio now survives only among the world’s poorest and most marginalized communities, where it stalks the most vulnerable children. Places like this have been denigrated and spat-upon by our leadership in Washington. In our president’s eyes, these places are not worth the trouble or economic investment it takes to deal with them. Forgetting about compassion, our government now exudes a racist and hateful attitude towards anyone that comes from beyond our shores, with the possible exception of our European allies. What our president fails to realize, however, is that we live on an inter-connected planet, where the next virus transmission is but a plane-ride away. There’s no better example for this than to look at what happened as the Corona virus spread around the globe at virtually lightning speed.
So, my question for the day is, was it right to pull out of the WHO at this critical time? To borrow a popular phrase, should we “defund” this organization right in the middle of a global pandemic? Are there shortcomings in the management of money and resources at the WHO? Most probably yes. Does the US provide an out-sized amount of financing for the WHO projects around the world? Most certainly yes. But these are problems that should and could be negotiated between the WHO members (including the U.S) and its leadership. Instead, our president has chosen to walk away from the game like a petulant child who doesn’t get his way. The supposed champion of the “art of the deal” apparently can’t negotiate successfully with his peers worldwide. Instead, he huffs and puffs and pulls our country further and deeper into its turtle shell, and ignores the whole world around us. It is an embarrassment. And it has to end on November 3.
David Ardam is an attorney living and practicing in Commack for nearly 40 years. He joined the Commack-Kings Park Rotary Club in 1983 and remains a proud member today. He was selected as Rotary International’s District Governor for District 7260 (now 7255) and served the greater Long Island community in that role in 2007-08, and until this June 30, served for 8-10 years as the Polio Eradication Subcommittee Chair for the district. He currently sits on the Board of Gift of Life, Long Island, New York, Inc. The opinions expressed in this article are his own, and not necessarily those of Rotary International or the Commack-Kings Park Rotary Club.