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

“President Trump is trying to downsize the WHO, and the question is whether other high-income nations like those in Europe, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere will pick up some of the slack,” says Vermund. “Will the Gates Foundation, which has been a very generous donor, take some? It is conceivable that others would hold things until they have a new administration that might be more friendly to the WHO, but I doubt they can take the entire part of the WHO budget that is paid by the United States.”

And it is not only money that the United States provides to WHO, but also personnel and expertise. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has seconded a number of staff to the WHO, and I predict that the Trump administration, with a new CDC director, will call those people home,” says Vermund. “This would create a great space, because the WHO funds do not pay for those individuals. So I think there would be an almost immediate reduction of the workforce and the removal of critical professionals in the WHO organization.”

According to Gostin, much of the money that the United States provides to the WHO is core mandatory funding, which all members are required to give, but some funds are specifically earmarked for causes in which the United States has an interest, such as and the eradication of poliomyelitis. HIV/AIDS, and the process of identifying and controlling disease outbreaks before they spread and reach American shores. Without US funding, Gostin says these programs won’t disappear entirely, but they will be significantly weakened.

“Polio could come back,” says Gostin. “Remember that we had polio in the sewage in New York just a couple of years ago, and our children are not immunized. And we had other real health scares in the United States, not just Covid-19 , which has killed more than a million people. We’ve had Zika, and the next health emergency could be just a mutation or two away. It’s already here in the form of bird flu, and we need WHO to help with it this”.

Both Gostin and Vermund fear that the withdrawal from the WHO will put the United States at the back of the line when it comes to receiving critical information such as pathogen samples and genomic sequence data, which pharmaceutical companies need to generate effective vaccines. . Gostin cites how the US relies on WHO data each year to effectively update the seasonal flu vaccine, while Vermund explains that financially speaking, it is much more efficient for the US to fund the WHO to help “snuff out” diseases at their source, rather. than to try to face them when they arrive in the country.

“We spent more than $2 billion to prepare for Ebola to hit the shores of the United States in 2014 and 2015, and since we only had five or six cases, it was very ineffective,” says Vermund. “So it’s a typical example of how when the United States goes alone, it will be very inefficient compared to contributing to a multinational response to control a disease in the country of origin.”