https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/29/us-withdrawing-from-who-289799
HEALTH CARE
Trump announces U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization
Alarmed health experts said the move will set back global efforts to fight the pandemic.
Trump announces U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization
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By BRIANNA EHLEY and ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
05/29/2020 03:23 PM EDT
Updated: 05/29/2020 07:16 PM EDT
President Donald Trump on Friday said he would make good on his threat to withdraw from the World Health Organization — an unprecedented move that could undermine the global coronavirus response and make it more difficult to stamp out other disease threats.
Trump has criticized the United Nations health agency for failing to quickly sound the alarm when the novel virus emerged and accused it of helping China cover up the threat it posed. "Countless lives have been taken and profound economic hardship has been inflicted all around the globe," Trump said in a brief statement from the White House.
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Trump's announcement was quickly panned by health experts, who claimed it would set back global efforts to track and defeat a virus that's already killed more than 360,000 people and sickened nearly 6 million. But the move has been cheered by Trump's base, which is distrustful of international bodies.
The U.S. has relied on its partnership with the WHO and other countries to share crucial data and information, including on treatments and potential vaccine development for the coronavirus, as well as other public health threats including HIV and Ebola. Experts cautioned the nation's public health response to the coronavirus and other emerging diseases would lag without that international cooperation.
The American Medical Association, the nation’s largest physician group, urged Trump in the “strongest terms possible" to reverse the decision. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the head of the chamber's health committee, warned canceling U.S. membership could disrupt clinical trials for vaccines that will be in high demand around the world.
"Certainly there needs to be a good, hard look at mistakes the World Health Organization might have made in connection with coronavirus, but the time to do that is after the crisis has been dealt with, not in the middle of it," Alexander said.
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Trump last month temporarily froze U.S funding to the WHO while his administration was reviewing membership. The U.S has previously contributed over $400 million per year to WHO's $4.8 billion annual budget, more than any other country.
Trump sent a letter earlier this month to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, threatening to make the funding freeze permanent if the organization did not make unspecified "substantive changes" in the next 30 days. Just 11 days later, Trump claimed the reforms had not been made and the U.S. would withdraw from the organization.
WHO officials and the agency’s defenders said a comprehensive review of the agency’s pandemic response should take place, but that U.S. withdrawal would make it harder to muster an international response to the coronavirus and other critical public health work. Critics of Trump’s decision said it would leave the U.S. without any leverage to demand Trump's requested changes while enabling China to have greater influence over the body.
It's not clear how quickly Trump can withdraw from WHO and if he needs congressional approval. House Democrats have complained Trump doesn’t have the authority to cut off WHO funding and accused him of scapegoating the organization to distract from his own administration's stilted response to the pandemic. When Trump announced the temporary freeze last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would “swiftly” challenge the move but did not elaborate further on what action might be taken.
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A senior administration official said Trump is committed to withdrawing from WHO, and U.S. employees detailed at the organization are likely to return. A number of CDC employees are typically stationed at the organization.
"None of us in the administration is under the assumption that this is temporary or will be reversed,” the official said. “This is a fundamental repudiation of the WHO and its failed mission."
A CDC spokesperson did not immediately say what impact Trump’s announcement might have on the agency’s relationship with WHO.
Richard Horton, editor in chief of the Lancet, the prominent British medical journal that's been critical of Trump's coronavirus response, called the U.S. withdrawal from WHO “madness and terrifying both at the same time."
“The US government has gone rogue at a time of humanitarian emergency. All leaders must call for renewed international solidarity in support of multilateral cooperation,” he said on Twitter.
Several conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups cheered the move, blasting the international group not only for its treatment of China but also its record of support for access to reproductive health services, including birth control and abortion.
“I am proud that our country will no longer be sending taxpayer dollars to support this radical regime,” said Allan Parker, president of The Justice Foundation, a legal group that opposes abortion rights. “True, life-saving health measures can be funded through other organzations without an abortion agenda.”
Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
https://time.com/5847505/trump-withdrawl-who/
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- TRUMP SAID HE WOULD TERMINATE THE U.S. RELATIONSHIP WITH THE W.H.O. HERE'S WHAT THAT MEANS
Trump Says U.S. 'Terminating' Relationship With the World Health Organization Over Its Coronavirus Response
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BY ELIJAH WOLFSON
JUNE 4, 2020 8:00 AM EDT
The World Health Organization(WHO) has driven the charges leading to some of the 20th century’s greatest public health triumphs. And throughout WHO’s 72-year history, the U.S. has been the organization’s star player, coach, and biggest sponsor. During the WHO’s latest funding cycle, the U.S. contributed $893 million—15% of the entire budget and more than twice as much as any other country. That has been the norm for decades and put the U.S. at the center of the world’s most important public-health apparatus.
Then came Donald Trump and COVID-19.
On April 14, by which time it had become clear the viral disease had inextricably burrowed into the U.S. populace, the President alleged at a press conference that the coronavirus’ spread in the country was probably the WHO’s fault, not his Administration’s. “I am instructing my Administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” he said. “Everybody knows what’s going on there.” About a month later, on May 18, he expounded on that “what” in a letter to WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom, making a number of allegations—many false or misleading—about the organization’s efforts in the early days of the pandemic. Trump concluded that if the WHO did not commit to “major substantive improvements within the next 30 days,” he would make the temporary freeze of U.S. funding to WHO permanent, and “reconsider” membership in the organization.
Trump did not specify what improvements he wanted to see. In any case, on May 29, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, the President said the U.S. would terminate its relationship with the WHO.
A U.S. president cannot snap their fingers and sever this relation; under U.S. law the country must give the WHO a year’s notice, and must meet its financial obligations to the organization for the current year. So, at the least, nothing would really change until mid-2021—by which point Trump may no longer be President and his successor may revoke the decision—and until the U.S. pays off the $60 million it currently owes the WHO.
However, Trump’s rhetoric has already had an impact on the WHO’s operation: negotiations for new funding are currently on hold, says Imre Hollo, director of planning, resource coordination and performance monitoring for the organization. And while the majority of WHO programs have been pre-funded through 2020, the organization anticipates feeling the funding gap “more completely in 2021,” says Hollo as many of its current financial agreements come to an end at some point this year. Despite that, he remains optimistic that the WHO will patch up its relationship with the U.S.; so is his boss, Dr. Tedros, who said on June 1, “The world has long benefited from the strong, collaborative engagement with the government and the people of the United States…. It is WHO’s wish for this collaboration to continue.”
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If it doesn’t, there would be some clear and specific impacts on the global effort to improve public health. In broad terms, the WHO’s funding can be broken down into two categories: “assessed” and “voluntary” contributions. Assessed contributions are the dues each country pays to be part of the WHO, and are determined, more or less, by each country’s gross national income, population and debt. For WHO’s 2018-2019 funding cycle, the U.S. got by far the world’s largest invoice, at about $237 million.
But perhaps more important to the future of the WHO and global public health are the voluntary contributions. For 2018-2019, the U.S. voluntarily added some $656 million to the WHO’s coffers, nearly twice as much as any other country.
Unlike the assessed dollars, which go into the general WHO pot and are spent at the organization’s discretion, voluntary contributions can be earmarked by the giver for specific uses. For example, the U.S. put some $166 million towards polio eradication during 2018-19 and has funded the effort with similar enthusiasm for years—one of the major reasons why the world is literally a few dozen cases away from total eradication. Other benefactors such as the U.K, The Gates Foundation and Rotary International also commit contributions specifically for WHO’s polio work, certainly, but were would the effort be should the U.S. disappear?
Worse off still might be the programs geared towards preventative care. The U.S., for example, accounts for over 40% of the WHO’s budget to “increase access to essential health and nutrition services”—and all of the U.S. contributions to that program are voluntary. Programs that focus on tropical disease research, HIV and hepatitis, and tuberculosis are other likely victims if the U.S. does withdraw from WHO. “It’s always easy to fundraise for panic,” says Hollo. “It’s hard to fundraise for preparedness.”
The impacts wouldn’t be felt just abroad. Were the U.S. to leave the WHO, scientists and public health officials in the states would suddenly find themselves cut off from some of the most important global health communication channels. You don’t need to look too far into the past to see how this might play out: In the early days of COVID-19, “not all of the data from China was public. It was shared among the WHO member states initially before it was put out in public bulletins,” says Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit think tank, That information, in theory, should have enabled U.S. health infrastructure to rapidly spring into action, and take steps to mitigate the worst viral outcomes. It didn’t of course, but that failure can hardly be pinned on the WHO.
“No one’s saying that the organization is perfect, but it works as well as it could,” says Glassman. Ultimately, the U.S. must cooperate with other nations to protect Americans against global health threats, she says. “We have to negotiate, to converse with them, to get into them, and to work together. The WHO is the way to do that.”
A version of this story appears in the June 15, 2020, issue of TIME.
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