The United Nations was planning a grand celebration of its 75th anniversary to kick off the annual high-level UN General Assembly Week last September. Instead, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN had to settle for a mostly virtual event. There really wasn’t much to celebrate anyway. The UN system overall continued its pattern during 2020 of a bloated bureaucracy attempting to establish its relevancy with meaningless resolutions, pronouncements and expensive programs.
The UN’s efforts to resolve disputes and end violent conflicts have too often proven fruitless. Too many UN agencies spend their time focusing on trying to realize their warped vision of social justice and massive world-wide wealth redistribution, while not getting the UN’s own dysfunctional house in order. The UN continuously has its hand out for more and more money beyond its regular budget to fund all manner of wasteful causes. In 2020, the United Nations system once again demonstrated the truth of Winston Churchill’s description of socialism: “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”
The UN’s simplistic answer to the pandemic is to transfer many more billions of dollars from developed countries to developing countries
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres tried to cast the COVID-19 pandemic crisis as a wake-up call for more global solidarity “to do things right for the future.” He gave speech after speech throughout 2020 calling for all UN member states to work together to mitigate the health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and to fashion a “green” economic recovery that combats the “existential” threat of climate change. “Both crises point to the need for a new, effective multilateralism to provide global governance on issues that concern us all,” said Secretary General Guterres.
However, action speaks louder than words. When it came to China’s outrageous concealment of the truth regarding the human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus at a time when effective measures could have been taken to limit the virus’s spread beyond China’s borders, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) stood with China. WHO used Orwellian doublespeak when it defended China’s “transparency.” Secretary General Guterres did not call out China for its selfish deceit nor WHO for helping China’s coverup. President Trump decided to withdraw the United States from WHO and not return until WHO undergoes serious reform. Joe Biden has indicated his intention to restore the U.S.’s WHO membership and funding, presumably without any preconditions.
The UN’s simplistic answer to the pandemic is to transfer many more billions of dollars from developed countries to developing countries. The purpose would be to finance, as one example, the World Health Organization’s unproven COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility to buy and deliver coronavirus vaccines centrally. The objective is to treat vaccines developed with significant risk-taking and investment of resources by national governments and the private sector in more developed economies as a “global public good.”
WHO’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, China’s buddy, said that vaccines “must be shared equally”
WHO’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, China’s buddy, said that vaccines “must be shared equally.” He has downplayed the importance of intellectual property protection for proprietary vaccines, despite its obvious value in incentivizing research that led to the vaccine breakthroughs in the first place.
Moreover, WHO’s notion of a “fair allocation mechanism” for distributing coronavirus vaccines among nations is downright baffling. WHO would first have all countries participating in COVAX to receive vaccines proportional to their population until 20% of a nation’s population is covered. Then, in the second phase, vaccines for additional people would be distributed to countries based on how urgently vaccinations are needed – i.e., to countries, regardless of size, with the most vulnerable subpopulations. This is entirely the reverse of what good medical practice and plain old common sense would dictate.
China has decided to join COVAX. Thus, to begin with, it will be entitled to receive vaccines being distributed through COVAX in proportion to its population. Given the fact that China has the world’s highest population of approximately 1.4 billion people, China would be entitled under the COVAX formula in the first phase to receive enough vaccine doses for up to at least 280 million people (over 80 percent of the entire U.S. population), irrespective of urgency of need. The opportunity for China to hoard is all too real.
Fortunately, the United States has not joined COVAX to date, despite urging from the UN. Joe Biden would be a fool to reverse President Trump’s decision and join COVAX. There is reason to be concerned. Biden has already pledged to rejoin the UN’s Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which China is gaming to the great economic disadvantage of the United States once it becomes a participant again. Biden may well leap at the chance to demonstrate his commitment to globalism by latching on to COVAX
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Human rights is an area where the UN’s failings are most glaring
Human rights is an area where the UN’s failings are most glaring. As UN Watch noted, “The rights-abusing regimes of China, Cuba, Russia and Pakistan were elected to the UN’s top human rights body, raising the percentage of non-democracies on the UN human rights council from 51% to a staggering 60%.” To add insult to injury, Chinese diplomat Jiang Duan was appointed last April to represent the Asia-Pacific region in the five-member Consultative Group of the Human Rights Council. This perch gives China the ability to influence greatly the selection of the Council’s human rights investigators in areas where China is one of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including abridgements of freedom of speech, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary detentions.
The UN General Assembly had no problem passing 17 one-sided resolutions in 2020 condemning Israel for alleged human rights abuses, while passing only six regarding the rest of the world combined. China was not the subject of any of the six other resolutions, despite the Communist regime’s horrendous treatment of approximately 13 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, including arbitrary mass detentions. Serial human rights abusing countries such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Cuba, and Turkey also got a free pass from the General Assembly.
The UN’s most powerful body, the Security Council, has achieved virtually nothing positive in using its powers to reduce threats to international peace and security. Flashpoints that occupy its regular agenda, such as in Yemen, Libya, and Syria, continue to burn despite all the hollow statements and resolutions emanating from the Security Council. UN peacekeepers authorized by the Security Council to be sent to various hot spots have continued to engage in sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children with virtual impunity.
As to Iran, the Security Council disgraced itself by not extending the arms embargo against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, as the United States had urged, past the initial expiration date of October 18, 2020.
To give credit where it is due and end this article on a relatively positive note, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian work in combating hunger and its “efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” The billions of dollars now being diverted to the UN’s many wasteful programs such as the Green Climate Fund would be better spent helping the WFP feed the world’s hungriest people who are starving because of natural and man-made disasters.
The United Nations was planning a grand celebration of its 75th anniversary to kick off the annual high-level UN General Assembly Week last September. Instead, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN had to settle for a mostly virtual event. There really wasn’t much to celebrate anyway. The UN system overall continued its pattern during 2020 of a bloated bureaucracy attempting to establish its relevancy with meaningless resolutions, pronouncements and expensive programs.
The UN’s efforts to resolve disputes and end violent conflicts have too often proven fruitless. Too many UN agencies spend their time focusing on trying to realize their warped vision of social justice and massive world-wide wealth redistribution, while not getting the UN’s own dysfunctional house in order. The UN continuously has its hand out for more and more money beyond its regular budget to fund all manner of wasteful causes. In 2020, the United Nations system once again demonstrated the truth of Winston Churchill’s description of socialism: “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.”
