Trump’s Plan to Leave the WHO Is a Health Disaster

“President Trump is trying to downsize the WHO, and the question is whether other high-income countries in Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere pick up some of the slack,” Vermond said. “Will the Gates Foundation, which is a very generous donor, collect anything? It is conceivable that others will deal with the situation until we have a new administration that may be more friendly to the WHO, but I doubt they can take the entire WHO budget to pay for the US.”

And it’s not just money that the United States provides to WHO, it also provides staff and expertise. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has supported a lot of staff at WHO, and I would predict that the Trump administration, along with the CDC director, will call those people home,” Vermond said. “It will create quite a gap, because the WHO fund does not pay for those people. So I think you need almost immediate workforce reductions and removal of critical professionals within the WHO organization.”

According to Gostin, much of the money the United States pays to the WHO is core mandated funding, which all members must pay, but some funding is earmarked specifically for causes in which the United States has an interest, such as polio eradication, HIV/AIDS, and The process of detecting and controlling disease outbreaks before they spread to American shores. Without U.S. funding, Gostin said these programs wouldn’t disappear entirely, but they would be significantly weakened.

“Polio can come back,” says Gostin “Remember we had polio in New York sewage just a few years ago, and our children are not being vaccinated. And we’ve had other real health scares in the US, not just Covid-19, which killed more than a million people. We’ve had Zika, and the next health emergency could be just a mutation or two away. Maybe it’s already here in the form of avian influenza and we need WHO to help us with that.”

Both Gostin and Vermund fear that withdrawing from the WHO will put the United States behind the line when it comes to obtaining critical information, such as pathogen samples and genomic sequencing data, that drug companies need to develop effective vaccines. Gostin cited how the U.S. relies on WHO data each year to effectively update the seasonal influenza vaccine, while Vermund explained that, financially speaking, it pays for the U.S. to help the WHO “snuff” diseases at their source. is much more effective. Rather than trying to deal with them when they come home.

“We spent over $2 billion in 2014 and 2015 to get Ebola off the U.S. coast, and because we only had five or six cases, it was very expensive,” Vermond said. “So this is a typical example of how the United States going it alone, it would be very inefficient compared to contributing to a multinational response to control a disease in the country of origin.”