The recent announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization has raised questions about its future viability and may signal lingering resentment over its capitulation to Chinese censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last week President Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating withdrawal from the WHO, citing unfair dues and the outsize influence of certain member states on the organization.
This week, serious questions are swirling about the organization’s survival in Washington and in Geneva.
WHO leaders present at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week privately acknowledged the U.S. is serious about its plan to leave the organization and that it will take a big gesture to persuade them to go back in, according to a source speaking on condition of anonymity.
“If the United States withdraws it may well collapse,” said health care consultant Kathleen Sebelius, who served as the Department of Health and Human Services secretary during the Obama administration, in a CNN interview on Monday.
Trump raised the possibility of remaining in the WHO if the organization implements reforms during a Jan. 26 speech.
“Maybe we would consider doing it again. I don’t know. Maybe we would. They have to clean it up a little bit,” he said.
But hopes among WHO supporters that the executive order was merely a negotiation tactic towards reforming but ultimately remaining in the organization were diminished Monday when a news report revealed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been instructed in a memo to immediately cease work with the WHO.
CDC referred questions to the Department of Health and Human Services, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration’s effort to slash government spending, recently stopped a $37 million check from going to the WHO, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. Some supporters of the WHO had hoped that the Trump administration would follow international conventions that call for dues to be paid before withdrawal from a treaty.
The executive order also calls for a renewed focus on biosecurity within the National Security Council. It instructs the president’s national security advisor to “establish directorates and coordinating mechanisms within the National Security Council apparatus as he deems necessary and appropriate to safeguard public health and fortify biosecurity.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation talked to experts about why the WHO bent to pressure from China during the pandemic and what the future of the WHO, or whatever replaces it, may look like.
China’s sway
Trump’s executive order coincided with the five-year anniversary of the WHO’s decision to decline to declare a public health emergency of international concern for the novel coronavirus while Chinese authorities scrambled to contain and conceal the spiraling crisis in Wuhan.
Evidence suggests that Chinese authorities were aware of small family clusters of a novel outbreak by December 31, 2019. But in the crucial early pandemic period in January 2020, China ordered the destruction of viral samples and cracked down on doctors for sharing information. After a lab in Shanghai published the novel coronavirus’s genetic sequence for the first time on Jan. 12, 2020, authorities shuttered the lab for “rectification.” Human-to-human transmission was not officially confirmed until January 19, 2020.
Yet by the time the WHO arrived in mid-February 2020, WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward told colleagues to “ensure we meet China’s need for a strong assessment of its response.”
In communications with the CDC, Aylward was “highly complementary” of China’s policies and “did not question the data coming from China,” according to a senior CDC official.
Select members of the WHO’s expert team had only been granted 48 hours in Wuhan. Yet the team’s report concluded that “China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.”
A March 2020 State Department cable outlined how the WHO’s praise of China’s lockdown in February 2020 was highlighted in state propaganda as a global endorsement of “the significant advantages of the [Chinese Communist Party’s] leadership.”
The Chinese government’s influence on the WHO continued into the Biden administration.
In January 2021, a second group of global experts tapped by the WHO traveled to Wuhan to work with Chinese scientists to assess the pandemic’s origins. Despite a limited tour inside China’s only maximum security lab in Wuhan with no access to the lab’s safety records, lab notebooks or viral samples, the team announced that the lab origin hypothesis was “extremely unlikely.”
The Chinese scientists on the team voted to indicate what origins scenario they found most likely with many non-scientist Chinese officials present, according to WHO Mission Leader Peter Ben Embarek, who said that “politics was always in the room.”
The U.S. and 13 other countries expressed concern about the report’s independence and validity.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus distanced himself from that conclusion, saying “all hypotheses remain on the table.”
Tedros called for the creation of a new global team, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens, to produce a more credible report.
Peter Daszak, the sole American on the mission to Wuhan, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s closest American collaborator. Daszak strongly opposed the convening of the SAGO and defended the “extremely unlikely” conclusion in an “ugly” Zoom meeting.
Experts who serve on WHO advisory groups must disclose any apparent conflicts of interest. Despite this, Carlos Morel, a molecular biologist at the Centre for Technological Development in Health in Brazil, a partner of Daszak on a multimillion dollar project, serves on the SAGO.
Four years after the WHO-China mission concluded a lab origin was “extremely unlikely,” the SAGO report that was supposed to provide a fairer analysis has never seen the light of day.
Morel did not respond to a request for comment.
“WHO has repeatedly asked China to share all available information on the earliest cases, animals sold in Wuhan markets, labs working with coronaviruses, and more, but to date it has not received this information,” WHO Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit Head Maria Van Kerkhove wrote in Science earlier this month.
Jamie Metzl has been among the most vocal proponents for an investigation in the lab origin hypothesis and has been critical of China’s pressure on the WHO.
A former Clinton administration official and advisor to the WHO, Metzl said in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation that experts once believed bringing China into the fold of global organizations like the WHO and World Trade Organization would help liberalize its politics and normalize U.S. relations with the regime. Even when that did not happen, scientists and public health officials believed their collaborations could transcend politics.
“Within the scientific community and in the U.S. government, even as things got worse politically, there was the belief that there were certain areas available for apolitical collaboration, including public health,” Metzl said. “Instead, China has parasitically taken advantage of these organizations.”
Metzl believes the U.S. should remain in the organization and counter China’s influence.
Should the WHO do biosecurity?
Other close observers of the WHO say that the organization’s struggles to honestly grapple with the origins of COVID-19 and the potential role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology are not solely attributable to the influence of China.
Many member states view biosecurity, especially as it relates to labs, as a national security issue rather than a public health issue.
Efforts in the early 2000s by the U.S. to incorporate biosecurity more fully into the WHO mission were opposed by other member states because of concern about national sovereignty, according to Ed Hammond, a longtime independent biosecurity researcher who has advised on resolutions at the World Health Assembly.
“Although things began to change post-9/11, public health officials worldwide have traditionally shied away from security politics … in order to preserve an ability to work anywhere,” Hammond told the DCNF. “WHO has a history of working across political lines, for instance in smallpox eradication during the Cold War.”
For the same reason, some functions of the WHO cannot be replicated by the National Security Council, according to Metzl.
“The National Security Council cannot do global polio eradication in countries that we have terrible relations with,” he said.
Whether the WHO should prioritize biosecurity and whether the U.S. can replicate or improve upon the WHO’s biosecurity work through the National Security Council are likely to be key questions in the coming months.
David Bell, a former WHO scientist, has led a research effort to analyze the efficacy of the WHO with the University of Leeds and the conservative Brownstone Institute.
Bell told DCNF that much of the WHO’s biosecurity work, including the surveillance of outbreaks of novel pathogens, amounts to mission creep away from its first principles of combating diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS. He said the shift was driven by private investors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical industry.
“For the last 25 years now there has been a big change in the funding of global health. If you go back to the 1990s it was WHO, UNICEF, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The Wellcome Trust was small and addressed childhood fever and malaria,” Bell said in an interview. “Then the private sector got involved, like Gates and pharma. And money speaks. The private sector now has a direct influence on policymaking. And they now have as much influence as the WHO.”
The Gates Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
Bell argues that the WHO has devoted too many resources to rare novel outbreaks and too few to less glamorous, more endemic diseases because of private funders’ interest in developing new vaccines.
“For COVID there were hundreds of billions of dollars of profit,” Bell said.
Bell’s research is part of a campaign called Action on World Health, which is chaired by conservative politician Nigel Farage, who led the Brexit movement to persuade the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.
Action on World Health is urging the U.S. to reject the International Health Regulations agreed to at the World Health Assembly in June 2024 over concerns they would “dictate national public health policies and restrict fundamental freedoms in a future pandemic.” Countries must provide notice to the WHO by April 2025 to reject the IHR amendments.
Matthew McKnight, the chief commercial officer of Ginkgo Bioworks, argues that biosecurity, including surveillance for novel viruses, is a central role of the WHO. Ginkgo has contracted with the CDC and the Pentagon on detecting novel human pathogens in the environment.
“How do you coordinate the global eradication of polio in the 1950s and 1960s? That’s WHO focusing on its core mission and doing biosecurity,” McKnight said.
McKnight argues that the WHO’s function of surveillance and coordination to detect novel viruses and sharing that data globally should be preserved or recreated with the U.S. and partner countries.
Whether the U.S. reenters the WHO or mimics its surveillance work via the National Security Council, it’s obvious that the status quo failed in the face of the worst pandemic in a century, McKnight said.
“The failure to see COVID coming was the worst intelligence failure since before 9/11. It’s thUnited States Mission Geneva_e worst intelligence failure since radar failed to detect the Japanese planes that attacked Pearl Harbor,” he said.
Featured Image Credit: United States Mission Geneva
