U.S. Withdraws From The World Health Organization

LONDON, Jan 22 (Reuters) – The United States formally left the World Health Organization on Thursday, a year after warnings it would harm public health in the United States and around the world, saying its decision reflected failures in the U.N. health agency’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic.

President Donald Trump announced with an executive order that the United States would leave the organization on the first day of his presidency in 2025.

According to a press release from the US Departments of Health and State Department, the US will work with WHO only on a limited basis to achieve the withdrawal.

“We have no plans to participate as observers and no plans to participate again,” a senior government health official said. The United States has said it plans to work directly with other countries rather than through an international organization on disease surveillance and other public health priorities.

Under US law, he was required to give one year’s notice and pay all outstanding wages (about $260 million) before leaving.

But a U.S. State Department official disputed that the statute included a requirement that any payment be made before withdrawal.

“The American people overpaid,” a State Department spokesman said in an email early Thursday.

The government has ended its funding contributions to the agency, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a document released Thursday. An HHS spokesman said Trump used his authority to pause future transfers of U.S. government resources to the WHO because the agency costs the United States trillions of dollars.

The US flag was removed from outside WHO headquarters in Geneva on Thursday, according to witnesses.

In recent weeks, the United States has moved to exit several other United Nations organizations, and some fear that Trump’s recently launched Peace Board could undermine the UN as a whole.

Several WHO critics have also suggested establishing a new institution to replace the organization; but a proposal document reviewed by the Trump administration last year suggested instead that the United States was pushing for reforms and American leadership at the WHO.

Last year, many global health experts, including most recently WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called for a rethink.

The WHO also said that the United States has not yet paid the fees it owes for 2024 and 2025. A WHO spokesman said member states would discuss the US departure and how it would be addressed at the WHO executive board in February.

“This is a clear violation of U.S. law,” said Lawrence Gostin, founding director of the O’Neill Institute for Global Health Law at Georgetown University in Washington, a close observer of the World Health Organization. “But it’s very likely that Trump will get away with it.”

Bill Gates, chairman of the Gates Foundation, a major funder of global health initiatives and some of the WHO’s work, told Reuters in Davos that he did not expect the United States to rethink the issue in the short term.

Gates said he would still advocate for the United States to rejoin. “The world needs the World Health Organization,” he said.

The US departure sparked a financial crisis that forced the WHO to cut its management team in half and downsize its business, cutting budgets across the agency. Washington has traditionally been by far the largest financial supporter of the UN health agency, contributing about 18% of total funding. WHO will also lay off about a quarter of its staff by the middle of this year.

The agency said last year it was working with the United States and sharing information. It was unclear how the collaboration would work going forward.

Global health experts said this poses a risk to the US, WHO and the world.

“A U.S. withdrawal from the WHO could weaken the systems and collaborations the world uses to detect, prevent and respond to health threats,” said Kelly Henning, public health program leader at Bloomberg Philanthropies, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization.

(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge, additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Davos and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Bill Berkrot)