The Trump administration on Thursday said it has completed the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which is led by Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. File Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/EPA-EFE
Jan. 23 (UPI) — The United States has completed its exit from the World Health Organization, the Trump administration said, one year since it began the withdrawal process.
“Like many international organizations, the WHO abandoned its core mission and acted repeatedly against the interests of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a joint statement on Thursday.
“Although the United States was a founding member and the WHO’s largest financial contributor, the organization pursued a politicized, bureaucratic agenda driven by nations hostile to American interests.”
Trump initiated the process to withdraw the United States from the United Nations’ intergovernmental health body on the first day of his second term in office via executive order.
Under U.S. law, the United States could withdraw from the WHO after a one-year notice. It also requires the United States, the WHO’s largest financial contributor, to fulfill its financial obligations to the organization for the fiscal year in which the notice was given.
Rubio and Kennedy said the WHO has refused to return the American flag that hung outside its headquarters, asserting that the organization has not approved the United States’ withdrawal due to outstanding payments.
The pair neither confirmed nor denied whether the United States was negligent on its bills but said that on its way out, “the WHO tarnished and trashed everything that American has done for it.”
“From our days as its primary founder, primary financial backer and primary champion until now, our final day, the insults to America continue,” they said.
The U.S. engagement with the WHO will be limited to completing the withdrawal and “to safeguard the health and safety of the American people.”
“All U.S. funding for, and staffing of, WHO initiatives has ceased,” they said.
UPI has contacted the WHO for comment.
Trump originally withdrew the United States from the WHO during his first term in office, accusing the organization of allegedly enabling China to cover up the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and its early outbreak of the disease.
President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s decision on his first day in office in January 2021.
Then, on his first day of his second term in the White House, Trump, via executive order, pulled the United States from the WHO, citing its “mishandling” of the pandemic as well as its seeking “unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payment.”
Trump has sought to distance the United States from the United Nations and its affiliated agencies, and more broadly from multilateral institutions and forums and intergovernmental engagement, under his America First international policy.
Earlier this month, the White House announced the U.S. withdrawal from 35 non-U.N. entities and 31 entities under the U.N. umbrella. Rubio said the organizations affected were deemed “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
Critics and Democrats have chastised Trump and his administration for seeking to pull the United States from the greater global community.
Ronald Nahass, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, called the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO “a shortsighted and misguided abandonment of our global health commitments.”
“Withdrawing from the World Health Organization is scientifically reckless,” Nahass said in a statement. “It fails to acknowledge the fundamental natural history of infectious disease. Global cooperation is not a luxury; it is a biological necessity.”
On the other hand, Mike Waltz, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., celebrated the move.
“We stand proud in our commitment to American sovereignty,” he said on X.