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,