A Healthy Reset: Trump Withdraws U.S. From World Health Organization

President Donald Trump has kept his campaign promise to protect American national sovereignty from encroaching global governance bodies by ordering the U.S. to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO).

An executive order titled "Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization" says the United States will leave WHO due to its "mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states" -- presumably the People's Republic of China, which sponsored the selection of WHO General-Secretary Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus. The exit order, which will take effect one year after notification, came amidst a flurry of executive orders the president signed within hours of taking the oath of office.

"The Trump administration's announcement that it will withdraw from the WHO is a welcome step toward a healthy 'reset' of current global power dynamics," Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand exclusively. "The WHO and other U.N. bodies had become swollen with power and gone off-course, steamrolling national sovereignty through bureaucratic and hidden decision-making."

The World Health Organization has increasingly stated its support for abortion-on-demand and extreme gender ideology. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO has included "comprehensive abortion care" in the list of "essential health services," stated WHO's March 2022 "abortion care guideline." WHO also added the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol on its "List of Essential Medicines." Last June, WHO established "official relations" with the radical abortion and transgender lobbyists at the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR).

The World Health Organization's overreach came to the fore with its attempts to negotiate a WHO Pandemic Agreement. The controversial pact would limit national sovereignty, transfer 20% of all U.S. vaccines and medications to WHO, follows a "One Health" philosophy equating human well-being with animal and plant life, and empowers social media companies to crack down on purported "misinformation."

Experts branded the pact counterproductive to public health, stating it only served to enhance WHO's authority over sovereign nation-states. Family Research Council has warned the terms of the WHO Pandemic Agreement creates global mechanisms that could one day "function as a 'turnkey totalitarian state.'" After scrutinizing the text, a congressional report on COVID-19concluded, "The World Health Organization's Draft 'Pandemic Treaty' Does Not Solve the Organization's Underlying Problems and May Affirmatively Harm the United States." 

After negotiations deadlocked, WHO officials announced last November that the global governance body would not finalize the text of the sovereignty-stripping accord during the Biden administration, as anticipated.

Under the terms of President Trump's executive order, the U.S. will play no role in its future. The EO states that "the Secretary of State will cease negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the amendments to the International Health Regulations, and actions taken to effectuate such agreement and amendments will have no binding force on the United States." In May, WHO amended its International Health Regulations (IHRs) for the first time in 19 years to label "misinformation and disinformation" as "public health risks" which nations must fight as one of their "core capacities."

Then-candidate Trump promised to exit the WHO Pandemic Agreement last May, stating, "I will rip them up and throw them out on day one of the Trump administration." Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said the agreement should be "dead in the water."

In his first term, President Trump announced his intention to depart WHO in July 2020, but President Joe Biden rescinded his notification on his first day in office. Trump, in turn, erased Biden's reversal on his first day in office.

An American departure would blow a large hole in WHO's finances. U.S. taxpayers are the largest single donor to the World Health Organization, giving WHO $1.28 billion over two years in 2022-2023. "The U.S. is a massive funder of the WHO. Their own livelihood is on the line," Weber told "Washington Watch" guest host Jody Hice on Tuesday.

Yet the World Health Organization responded to the news by saying, while it "regrets" America's decision to leave and hopes "the United States will reconsider," WHO will change nothing in its ever-expanding reach for global power. "WHO has over the past 7 years implemented the largest set of reforms in its history" to maximize its "impact in countries. This work continues."

The statement also seemingly claimed a share of credit for U.S.-led improvements in global health. "For over seven decades, WHO and the USA have saved countless lives and protected Americans and all people from health threats. Together, we ended smallpox, and together we have brought polio to the brink of eradication. American institutions have contributed to and benefited from membership in WHO," the organization asserts.

The executive order paves the way for a global health reset that respects national self-determination while paring back the left-leaning, often imperious views of such global institutions as the WHO. Trump's executive order appears to envision a transition to doctoring global maladies through robust bilateral and multilateral agreements, ordering federal officials to "identify credible and transparent United States and international partners to assume necessary activities previously undertaken by the WHO."

Going forward, Americans must assure that such bilateral agreements "are representative of the will of the American people, and do not also draw us into other relationships that are equally problematic as the WHO," said Weber, who attended the 77th World Health Assembly in Geneva last May and reported on each day's proceedings for TWS. It also orders the director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy to "review, rescind, and replace" the Biden-era "2024 U.S. Global Health Security Strategy as soon as practicable."

"While nations need to coordinate to address diseases and other international health crises, they can do so through agreements and relationships that protect their national sovereignty," Weber told TWS. While nations need "a mechanism to prevent diseases that cross borders," Weber warned this accord and others show U.S. national "sovereignty being eroded as global bodies, including the World Health Organization, aggregate power to themselves."

This decision, and other first-day actions by President Trump, constitute a new "America First foreign policy, one that serves our interests, and not the interests of diplomats or elite global circles, to the detriment of the American people," Weber told Hice, praising a separate Trump executive order that "pauses foreign aid for a period of time until the whole system can be reformed."

Originally published at The Washington Stand