Margaret Chan Quotes
There is a cost to every decision, and whether or not you impose a public health order has costs to industry and the public.
Margaret Chan, Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Hong Kong Physician & Director of the Pandemic Research Center of the World Health Organization (WHO), Seminar, Kennedy School of Government, 1991
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In 1988 a proposition regarding AIDS was on the California ballot which was opposed by every major medical group in the state. Just before the election Governor George Deukmejian endorsed the proposition. Three members of his AIDS California Task Force resigned in protest:
This principle justified the Government in allowing a local Indonesian company to manufacture anti-AIDS drugs without paying licensing rates demanded by the drug companies that held the patents. The principle is that patent rights and the desire to profit should not supersede the rights of people to continue to live because they cannot afford the drugs to keep them alive. The local manufacturers provide the drugs to the government at cost of manufacture which is a tiny proportion of the price the patent owner charges.
A bomb threat was received and cell phones might be used to detonate a bomb by remote control. However, no one in the vicinity of the BART system could use their cell phones for ANY purpose. The cell phone had begun to be a major tool of protesters organizing demonstration, and many people were concerned that the police might decide that an impending demonstration was a danger to public safety and prevent demonstrators from organizing or coordinating using mobile phones. Civil libertarians argued that the police should have to get a court order and show probably cause in order to shut down a public communications system.
This is a noteworthy quotation because it illustrates—to a slightly exaggerated degree—a major difference between the public and private sectors. However, Conrad fails to point out that when government does try and establish several competitive programs and approaches, conservatives like him are the first say that the government officials do not know what they are doing and then they object to the “duplication” and “waste.” Further, usually, when a government entity does experiment as the private sector competitive system does, it is chastised by liberals and conservatives alike for having had attempts that failed or did not succeed well. Experimenting requires a cultural tolerance for failure or imperfection. Only very courageous executive politicians like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have been able to initiate many programs aiming at the same objective with the society keeping the best—like Social Security and rejecting the worst like the National Recovery Administration. See {631419} for his view.
See {630440} for an earlier English human relations statement of the idea.
Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, OBE, JP, FRCP is a Chinese-Canadian physician, who served as the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) delegating the People's Republic of China for 2006–2017. Chan has previously served as Director of Health in the Hong Kong Government (1994–2003), representative of the WHO Director-General for Pandemic Influenza and WHO Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases (2003–2006). In 2014, Forbes ranked her as the 30th most powerful woman in the world. In early 2018 she joined the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
