Trump orders US to leave WHO

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US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to have the US exit the World Health Organization (WHO), a move that public health experts say will undermine the nation’s standing as a global health leader and make it harder to fight the next pandemic.

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to have the US exit the World Health Organization (WHO), a move that public health experts say will undermine the nation’s standing as a global health leader and make it harder to fight the next pandemic. He accused the WHO of mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and other international health crises. The US will leave the WHO in 12 months’ time and stop all financial contributions to its work. The US is the biggest financial backer of the United Nations health agency.

The move was not unexpected. Trump has been railing against the WHO since 2020 when he attacked the agency over its approach to the coronavirus pandemic and threatened to withhold United States funding from it. But after he lost the 2020 election the threat did not materialise.

Leaving the WHO for the US would mean, among other things, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have no access to the global data that the agency provides. When China characterised the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in 2020, it released the information to WHO., which shared it with other nations. More recently, the WHO has become a target of conservatives over its work on a pandemic treaty to strengthen pandemic preparedness and set legally binding policies for member countries on surveillance of pathogens, rapid sharing of outbreak data, and building up local manufacturing and supply chains for vaccines and treatments, among others.

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Founded in 1948 with help from the United States, the World Health Organization is an agency of the United Nations. Its mission is to confront the biggest health challenges of our time and measurably advance the well-being of the world’s people. That includes bringing aid to war-torn areas like Gaza and tracking emerging epidemics like Zika, Ebola and Covid-19. The annual budget of WHO is about USD 7 billion and the US contributes an outsize share.

According to the experts, it will take some time for the United States to withdraw. A joint resolution adopted by Congress at the agency’s founding addressed a potential withdrawal and required the United States to give a year’s notice and pay its financial obligations to the organization for the current fiscal year.