President Trump is keeping his pledge to leave the World Health Organization from before the election.
He declared the start of the procedure to remove the United States from the United Nations body that deals with global health concerns in one of the numerous directives he made after taking office.
Since the height of the COVID era, Trump has been unhappy with WHO. He has frequently attacked the group for being owned and run by China and for reacting to the pandemic too slowly.
During a lengthy, informal interview with reporters while he signed executive orders, Trump said that World Health had defrauded them.
It will take a year for Trump’s vow to be formally announced. When the United States joined the global health organization in 1948, it set that as the time range for any future withdrawals.
Trump started the process of withdrawing from WHO and stopped funding it during his first term. However, Biden changed his mind right away after taking office before the one-year threshold was achieved.
The announcement made on Monday has important ramifications for WHO. They would lose by far their biggest benefactor and perhaps their most significant member. In 2022 and 2023, the United States gave $1.284 billion to WHO, hundreds of millions of dollars more than the second-largest donor, Germany.
Trump’s call has drawn criticism for the potential negative effects on the US. Among other things, WHO keeps an eye on risks to world health, assesses novel vaccines and drugs, plans responses to future and existing health problems, and offers governments professional assistance, especially in times of medical emergency.
In addition to losing a seat at the table when health standards and disease responses are set, the United States would no longer have easy access to vital outbreak data.
According to Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University and the head of the World Health Organization’s Center on Global Health Law, this is the most disastrous choice.
The national security and interests of the United States have been severely harmed by this. Our organizations, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), will be rendered totally blind as a result.
“Withdrawing is really bad for the U.S. [in terms of] access to data, surveillance, and being at the table negotiating and holding other countries accountable when there is an epidemic or pandemic,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and CEO of the Global Health Council, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for global health.
She stated in an interview with NPR last week regarding the potential withdrawal: Other powerful nations, such as China and Russia, would take [this] chance to influence the WHO.
After departing WHO, Brett Schaefer, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks the Trump administration can still take the lead in global health.
Before the announcement, he told NPR that there is almost no precedent for perhaps tackling pandemic challenges outside of the WHO. The World Health Organization has historically not been regarded as the most efficient or responsive means of tackling a range of global health issues, which is why UNAIDS, GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance), and the Global Fund exist.
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