Health Care/Joan Retsinas

Conceit of Exceptionalism: Do we Need the World Health Organization?

We Americans believe we are exceptional. The notion is bred into our psychic DNA. The history textbooks that have passed the scrutiny of local boards of education tell of a country that sprang de novo, a land of immigrants (we elide over the natives whom we squashed) who fled their homelands to sink into this new soil. The reality is that we carted many of the workers of that soil from Africa, in a prosperous trade that buoyed the fortunes of America’s founding elites. And huge chunks of the country went from the dominion of Spain to the United States with the signing of treaties.

Yet, unlike Europe we had no ingrained nobility, no five-centuries of tradition, no historic yokes that cemented people into social castes. (The Horatio Alger of famed story-telling was white).

So, we have spurned the “social welfare” legislation of Western Europe. National medical insurance? The Western European countries, as well as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, have it. We don’t need it, don’t want it.

We, so the myth goes, don’t follow the herd of Western Europe but chart our own exceptional course.

To date, we have embraced COVID with our own mixture of voodoo science (Clorox anyone?), blithe disregard, and scornful rejection of those strictures that would hamper us in our pursuit maybe not of life, but certainly of happiness. While other countries masked up, shut down, tested, quarantined, and monitored, we rushed to re-open. We could beat this virus with American gumption.

To date, while European countries have tamped COVID down, with cases and deaths low, we are seeing a surge. Do we have 60,000 cases a day? How many deaths? Florida, Texas, Alabama, California — the states are rich in COVID. And our country has emerged as a virus-pariah: we can’t travel to many places, without first testing, then quarantining, Indeed, some countries simply don’t want us.

As for opening schools, Betsy DeVos, the Cabinet Secretary for Education, threatens to withhold money from schools that don’t re-open, even though many parents, teachers, as well as governors, are reluctant to forge ahead. Ironically, she hasn’t promised federal funds to help schools expand the number and size of classrooms. Even more to the point, those European countries that did tamp down on the virus are opening their schools.

Now we want to retreat from the World Health Organization. The pandemic is world-wide. An organization focused on the world’s health would seem a good strategy. Has the WHO made mistakes? Of course. But it is the only repository for gathering data from the world, and the United States, exceptionalism aside, is part of the world.

Forget COVID; focus on the seasonal flu.

We don’t just willy nilly develop “the vaccine” each year for the flu. In fact, there are four types of flu; and different viruses circulate in different regions of the world. Laboratories in 125 countries send the genetic sequences of thousands of flu viruses to the WHO. Scientists compare them against the strains they already know about. Then they test vaccines, to find the ones that will best combat that season’s “flu.” The United States sits at that decision-table.

If the United States withdraws from the World Health Organization, it withdraws from that table. It will either simply accept the vaccine the WHO has developed (with no input from the United States) — a vaccine that may reflect strains more common outside the United States, or it will, perhaps, develop one on its own, without the data from the other 124 countries. We use 170 million of the 500 doses developed each year.

The belief that we can battle the flu, let alone COVID, on our own marks not only a trust in our exceptionalism, but our hubris.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

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