Among the slew of executive orders signed after reaching the White House Monday night, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), saying the far-reaching pandemic monitoring organization had “ripped off” the U.S.
The U.S. is the largest funder of the WHO, which monitors disease outbreaks around the world. The U.S. also majorly contributes to the WHO’s work — including collaborations with the CDC and NIH on issues like cancer prevention and global health security.
Trump’s executive order is an attempt to finish what he started in his last presidency and is all but guaranteed to succeed this time around. Trump removed the U.S. from the WHO in 2020, but withdrawal requires one year of advance notice. Biden took office six months later and revoked Trump’s action before it ever took effect.
This time around, the U.S.’s withdrawal is again supposed to be a yearlong process, confirmed Lawrence Gostin, professor of law and global health at George Washington University and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law & Human Rights.
But Trump will likely act as if he’s already withdrawn, disengaging from the WHO, and without bipartisan agreement from Congress to overturn Trump’s action, which isn’t likely, the WHO will officially lose its largest funder by 2026.
“And these are things that really matter to America, like HIV, AIDS, like Polio eradication and responding to health emergencies,” Gostin told ABC News. “Really in my mind this is shooting yourself in the foot and making America decidedly less safe and less secure.”
Trump, asked by a reporter Monday night about his experience leading the country during the COVID-19 pandemic and the importance of the WHO to mount a global response to pandemics, said the withdrawal was about “being ripped off.”
“Everybody rips off the United States and that’s it — it’s not going to happen anymore,” Trump said.
The text of the executive order describes an “unfair” demand of “onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments.”
“China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO,” the executive order said.
Gostin confirmed that China pays far less to the WHO. “But the fact that China should pay more doesn’t mean we should pay less. This isn’t leverage against China. This is gutting the World Health Organization,” Gostin said.
The WHO has an unmatched global reach, Gostin said, offering the U.S. vital insight into the global health system and allowing collaborations for scientific research — and though he acknowledged some reforms are necessary, he said that leaving the organization was “a cataclysmic presidential decision” that would be a “grievous wound to world health, but a still deeper wound to the US.”
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