Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Trump wants to fire Africa's Dr. Fauci

The toddler in chief in the White House is looking around for someone to take responsibility for his cascading failures in responding to the virus. Two wasted months that are amplifying the strain on the health system and raising the death toll couldn't be his fault, don't we understand? This week he's moved on from blaming out-of-office Barack Obama to smearing the World Health Organization.

The World Health Organization is part of the United Nations, founded after World War II to monitor and assist with the reality that infection doesn't respect national borders. The need for such an institution is obvious to anyone who is not a moron, as one of his early Secretaries of State concluded of the President. The U.S. contribution to the WHO was $553 million in 2019. That pittance is merely 4.5% of San Francisco's city budget, chump change in the U.S. toll of expenditures. Trump won't pay our share because he needs to throw a hissy fit.

Here's a profile of the doctor who is leading WHO's work against the pandemic in Africa by way of the South African Mail and Guardian. Like Dr. Fauci in the U.S., she's seen this horror show before.
(L Cipriani photo/WHO)
Every Thursday for the past month, journalists have dialled in from all over the continent to attend the virtual Covid-19 briefing by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The briefing is delivered from Brazzaville by Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, who calmly details the latest developments in Africa’s fight to contain the coronavirus

In doing so, switching effortlessly between English and French, Moeti has become the continent’s public face for this fight: a reassuring voice in the midst of our collective panic; an anchor in the gathering storm.

It helps that she has seen this all before. During her decades-long career in public health, Moeti has battled two other major epidemics. Her worst experience, she says — worse even than the current pandemic — was confronting HIV/Aids. When it first appeared, in the 1980s, there was no treatment. “It was the sense of helplessness, of not being able to do anything about all these people dying,” she told the Mail & Guardian in a telephonic interview.

Eventually, Moeti found a way to help. In the early 2000s, she led the WHO’s pioneering “3 by 5” initiative — an effort to get antiretrovirals to three million people in middle- and lower-income countries by 2005. Although it fell short of the target, reaching 1.3-million people, the initiative is “widely credited with jump-starting the global effort to widen treatment access to people living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries”, according to the HIV/Aids-focused charity Avert.

Since being elected to her current position in 2015 — the first woman in the role — Moeti was also at the forefront of the WHO’s response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. ...
Read it all.

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