During his first term he had threatened it: now Donald Trump back in the White House could pull the United States out of the World Health Organization “from day one.” According to the Financial Times, the president-elect’s transition team has already warned him about several scientists who point out the “catastrophic” impact the U.S. decision would have on global health.
Indeed, the WHO would lose its main source of funding, damaging its ability to respond to public health crises such as the coronavirus pandemic. “America is going to leave a huge vacuum in global health financing and leadership. I see no one that is going to fill the breach,” says Lawrence Gostin, professor of Global at Georgetown Law in Washington.
The United States is WHO’s largest single donor; it provided about 16 percent of funding in the 2022-2023 biennium.
However, Gostin says he is not sure that Trump will be as eager to get out of the WHO as certain members of his team. Prominent among them, of course, is the name of Health Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy. The eccentric scion of the Kennedy dynasty makes no secret of his no-vax beliefs. If the withdrawal happens, it will be “very lean years for the WHO where it will struggle to respond to health emergencies and will have to reduce its scientific staff considerably”. Gastin warned that if the US left the WHO, European countries were unlikely to step up funding and China might try to wield more influence. “It would not be a smart move as withdrawal would cede leadership to China,” he said.
In 2020, Trump had already started the process of leaving the WHO. The Covid-19 pandemic had not convinced him of the need for a global policy; indeed, he accused the UN international agency of being controlled by China, from whose territory the virus had spread. Trump’s confidence in multilateralism at all levels is close to zero, and his “Make America Great Again” does not include the idea that countries helping each other makes the world easier to navigate. In 2020, however, the process did not come to a conclusion, and President Joe Biden rebooted relations with the agency on his first day in office in 2021. According to experts, some members of Trump’s team would like to move much faster this time around.
Ashish Jha, former coordinator of the Biden White House Covid response and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, says “There are lots of people who are going to be part of the inner circle of the administration who do not trust the WHO and want to symbolically show on day one that they are out”.
According to Jha, bodies like the WHO are crucial for global cooperation on the development, distribution of vaccines and other therapies during health emergencies; but leaving the WHO could also mean disaster for U.S. health. “If you’re not committed to these institutions, you don’t have your ears to the ground when an epidemic occurs,” he warned; in essence, Washington risks being unprepared to respond. If the Trump administration will be dominated by people who believe that vaccines cause autism, and viruses come out of Chinese labs with the complicity of the WHO, it is unlikely that the world’s most powerful country would be able to react in a timely manner in the event of a new global epidemic.
Trump’s transition team did not comment directly on the potential withdrawal. A source close to the project told the Financial Times, “Are we talking about the WHO we left in the first administration? I would say we don’t really care what they have to say.”
The WHO did not comment. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the body’s director-general, said this month that it is a “unique organization” that hopes to collaborate with U.S. policymakers. “For our part, we are ready to work together,” he said. “I think U.S. leaders understand that the United States cannot be safe if the rest of the world is not.”
