President Trump spoke during the daily briefing of the White House Task Force on the Coronavirus in … [+]
On his first day back in the White House, President Trump signed an executive order that begins the process of withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. Ending US membership would cut the multilateral agency’s funding by 22%, severely challenging WHO’s ability to carry out its global public health mission.
Throughout WHO’s 76-year history, the US has been the organization’s most important sponsor. The US contributed $1.2 billion to the WHO in 2023, more than twice as much as any other member country. As the preeminent international public health apparatus with 194 member states, WHO plays a critical role in global health security, disease outbreaks and surveillance, and mobilizing cooperation between multiple public and private entities.
Currently, no other organization has the capacity to coordinate international rapid response efforts, share medical research and innovation, and disseminate critical intelligence. To illustrate, this includes, among other activities, the entity’s instrumental work on the multiple Ebola crises in Africa, measles outbreaks around the world, and sequencing of seasonal flu strains used to develop annual flu vaccines. WHO is also essential in efforts to eradicate HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and dozens of neglected tropical diseases, such as leishmaniasis, dengue fever and river blindness. NTDs refer to a diverse group of parasitic and bacterial diseases that cause significant morbidity and mortality in more than one billion people around the globe, which disproportionately affect poor and marginalized populations.
Since its inception, WHO has led numerous programs that have saved tens of millions of lives. One of the first major projects in which WHO was involved was a global immunization campaign that eventually led to the eradication of smallpox in 1980. And since 1977, WHO’s List of Essential Medicines—which is revised and updated every two years – it’s been vital. guidance for many nations in their drug procurement policies. Essential medicines are intended to be available in all health care systems, at all times, in appropriate quantities and in appropriate dosage forms.
The WHO Roadmap for NTDs, drawn up in London in 2012, contains targets for public-private partnership engagements related to logistics for the delivery of existing treatments, drug donation programs and funding for research and development. new pharmaceutical. Although there was a significant disruption as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, since 2012, there has nevertheless been significant progress in the implementation of large-scale disease prevention and treatment of patients suffering from NTDs.
If the US does indeed withdraw from the WHO, severe funding cuts would be extremely challenging for the multilateral agency, potentially limiting public health work globally.
WHO was founded in 1948 and is located in Geneva, Switzerland. It is a subsidiary body of the United Nations. As a specialized agency of the UN, WHO is responsible for international public health. Here, its role is to coordinate with all 194 member states on a wide range of public health activities, such as vaccination campaigns, water sanitation projects and support for countries dealing with health emergencies.
The US became a member of the WHO through a 1948 joint resolution passed by both houses of Congress. According to Lawrence Gostin, an expert in public health law, the unilateral action to notify the UN that the US is withdrawing violates US law because it does not have clear congressional approval to leave the WHO. In addition, under US law, the country must give WHO a year’s notice and must meet its financial obligations to the organization for the current year.
Trump first signaled his exit from the WHO in 2020
During his first term in office, Trump declared that he would withdraw funding for the World Health Organization, pending a “review” of “the organization’s role in the mismanagement and cover-up of the spread of the coronavirus.”
In the early stages of the public health crisis surrounding the novel coronavirus, the WHO was blatantly misled by the Chinese authorities. It appears that from late December to mid-January, Chinese authorities concealed and in some cases quashed reports of a then-nascent pneumonia-like illness.
The Chinese government informed the WHO China office on December 31, 2019, of dozens of cases of “mystery pneumonia” in Wuhan. But what the government didn’t reveal is that the virus had already been sequenced in Chinese labs and found to be very similar to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The Hubei Provincial Health Commission then ordered the labs to stop testing and destroy existing samples. Given that SARS is transmitted from person to person – although, as it turns out, less contagious than the new coronavirus – blacking out such important information for several weeks would have serious consequences.
It seems that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO was led astray by the Chinese authorities. On January 18, 2020, WHO “Preliminary investigations conducted by Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan.”
However, by late January, the WHO began posting repeated warnings to nations around the world about the new coronavirus and its human-to-human transmissibility. On January 30, 2020, the WHO declared a global health emergency. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed particular concern about “the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems and which are unprepared to deal with it”. The WHO also offered to supply diagnostic test kits, which the US declined, but many other countries accepted.
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. returned to a customary stance toward the WHO and continued to be its largest funder. But Republicans in Congress maintained their opposition, saying the WHO was not adopting needed reforms, pointing to the organization’s alleged inability to demonstrate independence from the political influence of some WHO member states, and opposing the signing of the U.S. for the world’s first pandemic treaty. , a proposed legally binding agreement designed to prevent, prepare for, and respond to future global pandemics.
The US has traditionally been the most generous provider of health and humanitarian aid to people in need around the world, as evidenced in part by the leading role it has played as a beneficiary of the WHO. As Trump’s second term begins, that greatness may be in jeopardy. In turn, this could pose a threat to public health worldwide.
