The United States will leave World Health Organizationthe president Donald Trump he said on Monday, saying the global health agency has mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and other international health crises.
Trump said the WHO did not act independently of “undue political influence by WHO member states” and demanded “unfairly onerous payments” from the US that were disproportionate to sums provided by other, larger countries such as China.
“World health has hijacked us, everyone has hijacked the United States.” It’s not going to happen again,” Trump said at the signing of the recall executive order, shortly after his second term inauguration.
The WHO said on Tuesday it regretted the move from the country’s biggest donor.
“We hope that the United States will reconsider and we really hope that there will be a constructive dialogue for the benefit of everyone, for Americans, but also for people around the world,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jašarevic told reporters in Geneva.
The move provides a 12-month deadline for the US to leave the United Nations health agency and stop all financial contributions to its work. The United States is by far the largest financial supporter of the WHO, contributing about 18 percent of total funding. The WHO’s latest two-year budget, for the period 2024-2025, was $6.8 billion.
Get daily national news
Get the most important news, political, economic and current affairs headlines of the day, delivered to your inbox once a day.
The U.S. departure is likely to threaten programs across the organization, according to several experts inside and outside the WHO, particularly those dealing with tuberculosis, the world’s biggest infectious disease killer, as well as HIV/AIDS and other health emergencies.
“This is the darkest day for global health that I have ever seen,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health at Georgetown University in Washington and director of the WHO Collaborating Center for National and Global Health Law. “Trump could be sowing the seeds for the next pandemic.”
Trump’s order says the administration will suspend negotiations on the WHO’s pandemic agreement while the withdrawal is underway. US government personnel working with the WHO will be recalled and redeployed, and the government will seek partners to take over necessary WHO activities, according to the order.
The administration will review, revoke and replace the 2024 US Global Health Security Strategy as soon as practicable, the order said.
The next largest donor to the WHO is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, although most of that funding goes to polio eradication. Its executive director, Mark Suzman, told X that the foundation would continue to advocate for strengthening, not weakening, the WHO. The next largest state donor in terms of combined mandatory fees and voluntary contributions is Germany, which accounts for about three percent of WHO funding.
Germany’s health minister said on Tuesday that Berlin hoped to dissuade Trump from the move, while the European Union expressed concern.
When asked about Trump’s decision, China’s foreign ministry said at a regular press briefing on Tuesday that the WHO’s role in global health governance should only be strengthened, not weakened.
“China will continue to support the WHO in fulfilling its obligations and deepen international cooperation in public health,” said Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for the ministry.
Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO is not unexpected. He took steps to leave the body in 2020, during his first term as president, accusing the WHO of aiding China’s efforts to “deceive the world” about the origins of COVID.
The WHO vehemently denies the allegations and says it continues to press Beijing to share data to determine whether COVID originated from human contact with infected animals or from research into similar viruses at a local laboratory.
Under US law, leaving the WHO requires a one-year notice period and payment of all outstanding fees. Before the US withdrawal could be completed for the last time, Joe Biden won the presidential election and stopped it on his first day in office on January 20, 2021.
– Reporting by Patrick Wingrove, Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge; Additional reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Louis Jackson in Beijing; Editing: Shri Navaratnam, Saad Saieed, Kate Mayberry and Tomasz Janovski
