Trump’s plan to withdraw from the WHO is a health disaster

“President Trump is trying to cut the WHO, and the question is whether high-income nations like Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere can pick up some of the slack,” Vermund says. “Will the Gates Foundation, a very generous donor, take some? One would think that others would fix things until they had a new administration that might be kinder to the WHO, but I doubt they could take the entire WHO budget paid for by the US.

The US contribution to the WHO is not only money, but also staff and expertise. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a number of staff to the WHO, and I would predict that the Trump administration will call those people home with the new CDC director,” Vermund says. “This will create quite a gap, because the WHO funds do not pay for those people. So, I think you will see almost immediate workforce reductions and removals of critical experts within the WHO organization.

According to Gostin, most of the money the U.S. gives to the WHO is basic mandatory funding that all members are required to give, but some funds are specifically for U.S. polio eradication, HIV/AIDS, and the identification and management of disease outbreaks before they spread and reach American shores. making process. Without U.S. funding, Gostin says these programs would not disappear entirely, but would be significantly weakened.

“Polio may be on the rise again,” says Gostin. “Remember that a few years ago we had polio in the sewage in New York and our children are not vaccinated. We have other real health scares in the US, not just Covid-19, which has killed more than a million people. We have Zika, and the next medical emergency may be just a mutation or two away. “Maybe it’s already in the form of bird flu and we’ll need WHO to help us with that.”

Both Gostin and Vermund fear that withdrawing from the WHO will put the United States on the back burner when it comes to obtaining critical data, such as pathogen samples and genomic sequence data, that pharmaceutical companies require to develop 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 more financially efficient for the US to fund the WHO to help ‘suppress’ diseases at their source. rather than trying to fight them when they come into the country.

“In 2014 and 2015, we spent over $2 billion preparing for Ebola to hit U.S. shores, and it was very ineffective because we only had five or six cases,” Vermund says. “So this is a typical example of how the United States, going it alone, will be very ineffective compared to contributing to a multinational response to control a disease in its country of origin.”