Trump’s plan to leave the WHO is a health disaster

“President Trump is trying to reduce WHO numbers, and the question is whether other high-income nations like those in Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere will pick up some of the slack,” Vermund says. “Will the Gates Foundation, which has been a very generous donor, take some? It’s possible that others can sort things out until we have a new administration that might be more WHO friendly, but I doubt they can take the entire portion of the WHO budget that is paid for by the US.

And the US provides the WHO not only with money, but also with personnel and expertise. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has seconded a number of staff to the WHO, and I would predict that the Trump administration with a new CDC director will call those people home,” Vermund says. “This would create a big gap as WHO funds do not pay for these individuals. So I think you will have an almost immediate reduction in manpower and removal of critical professionals in the WHO organization.

According to Gostin, much of the money the US gives to the WHO is basically mandatory funding that all members are required to give, but some funds are earmarked for causes in which the US has a vested interest, such as polio eradication, HIV/AIDS and the process of identifying and controlling disease outbreaks before they spread and reach American shores. Without U.S. funding, Gostin says those programs won’t disappear entirely, but they will be significantly weakened.

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

Both Gostin and Vermund fear that withdrawing from the WHO would put the US at the bottom of the line when it comes to obtaining critical information such as pathogen samples and genome sequencing data that pharmaceutical companies require 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 it is much more financially efficient for the US to fund the WHO to help “suppress” disease in their source rather than trying to deal with them when they arrive in the country.

“We spent over $2 billion to prepare for Ebola to hit US shores in 2014 and 2015. and because we only had five or six cases, it was very cost-inefficient,” Vermund says. “So this is a typical example of how when the US goes it alone, it will be very ineffective compared to contributing to a multinational response to control the disease in the country of origin.”