With less than a week in office, President Trump has already passed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. The executive order cites the WHO’s poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and that US involvement is being used to “destabilize world peace,” this sentiment was previously expressed in Project 2025, a blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation to help guide conservative policy over the next four years. Project 2025 states that Americans should be “prepared” to withdraw from the WHO, claiming the organization has failed how to deal with global health during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to overhaul international aid at the state or United States level instead of continuing involvement with the organization.
The United States is one of the biggest contributors to the WHO. America’s step back from the organization can lead to slowed efforts to provide essential healthcare, especially to low-income countries that lack the resources and funds to do it on their own. Tom Bollyky, director of global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, says, “This not only makes Americans less safe, it makes the citizens of other nations less safe”. There has been a backlash to the US departure on an international scale, claiming that the US can’t isolate itself from global health threats and that blocking travel into the United States is more of a red herring towards the real problem, which would be treating the health issues on a domestic scale.
So how much do we actually spend?
If we take a look at the US global healthcare budget, about 4% of our spending goes towards the WHO, which if we add that into our total expenses each year, accounts for about 0.1% of our federal budget. The annual budget for the WHO each year ends up being around $3.4 billion, which is about a little more than 1/3 of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which gets around $9.3 billion each year for federal spending. The funds put towards WHO help fight various diseases across the world, especially in low-income countries. As well as provide funds to areas the US does not directly fund, such as Gaza, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The WHO alerted its member countries of the COVID-19 pandemic being an international emergency on January 30th, 2020. Throughout the next two years, it helped with funding diagnostic tests, vaccines, and distribution of funds and resources in countries of need as well as providing updated information to member countries on how to keep their citizens safe from the virus. The US’s high death rate is highly believed to be due to internal policy struggles and not taking the warning from the WHO seriously, unlike other countries, such as Taiwan, South Korea, and China.
So now what?
Trump and Project 2025 claim that withdrawing from the WHO will allow the United States to focus more on its international aid programs instead of wasting funds on the WHO. Throughout the last couple of years, the WHO has made several amendments on transparency and how to handle any future possible pandemics. A criticism of Trump during his previous presidency, claiming that WHO wasn’t holding China accountable for being transparent, and still highly believes China is responsible for the widespread of the virus back in 2019 through 2020. Some experts claim that Trump’s claim to improve our own programs is a “red herring” as there were no executive orders passed, except to halt communication from the FDA and CDC to the American public until February. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the organization can lead to some other issues, while Trump is currently focused on lobbying with the pharmaceutical industry on protecting drug patents and not on letting low-income countries produce those drugs without the name in the name of a crisis. There are also concerns about the US leaving, although the WHO budget was only 15% from the United States, there is concern that with the US pulling out, they will lose their influence on public health as a whole, and that it could be filled by other countries, a large contender of that being filled by China. This could cause more issues for the United States further down the road with the loss of influence in a country we label our enemy.
The echoes of Project 2025 are being heard through this decision, with decisions being made based more on ideology instead of a strategy for facing disease. It is currently a gamble on how Trump and his new administration will face public health throughout the next few years.