President Trump moved quickly on Monday to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, a move that public health experts say will undermine the nation’s position as a global health leader and make it more difficult to fight the next pandemic.
In an executive order issued about eight hours after his inauguration, Mr. Trump cited a number of reasons for the withdrawal, including those from the WHO “Mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic” and “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms”. He said the agency was demanding “unfairly onerous payments” from the United States and complained that China was paying less.
The move was not unexpected. Mr. Trump has been lashing out at the WHO since 2020, when he attacked the agency for its approach to the coronavirus pandemic and threatened to withhold funding from the United States. In July 2020, Mr. Trump has taken formal steps to retire from the service.
But after he lost the 2020 election, the threat did not materialize. On his first day in office, January 20, 2021, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. blocked it from taking effect.
Leaving the WHO would mean, among other things, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would not have access to the global data provided by the organization. When China characterized the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in 2020, it released the information to the WHO, which shared it with other nations.
More recently, the WHO has been targeted by conservatives for its work on a “pandemic treaty” to strengthen pandemic preparedness and establish legally binding policies for member countries on pathogen surveillance, rapid sharing of outbreak data and developing local production and supply chains for vaccines and treatments, among others.
Treaty talks collapsed last year. In the United States, some Republican lawmakers saw the deal as a threat to American sovereignty.
Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University who helped negotiate the treaty, said the United States’ withdrawal from the WHO would be “a painful wound” to public health but “an even deeper wound to American national interests and national security.”
The World Health Organization, founded in 1948 with the help of the United States, is an agency of the United Nations. Its mission, according to its website, is “to address the greatest health challenges of our time and measurably advance the well-being of the world’s people.”
This includes providing aid to war-torn areas such as Gaza and monitoring emerging epidemics such as Zika, Ebola and Covid-19. WHO’s annual budget is approximately $6.8 billion. the United States has typically contributed a large share.
According to Mr. Gostin, it will take some time for the United States to withdraw. A joint resolution passed by Congress at the agency’s founding addressed a possible withdrawal and requires the United States to give one year’s notice and pay its financial obligations to the agency for the current fiscal year.
