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By: Carter Hull
In May of this year, President Trump announced that the United States would start the process of leaving the World Health Organization (WHO). Citing the WHO’s recent failures to flag the spread of the novel coronavirus, he has planned to withdraw the United States from the specialized agency of the United Nations by July 6, 2021. Although President-elect Joe Biden has signaled his intention to keep the United States in the WHO, the possibility that one of the most generous providers of health and humanitarian assistance to people around the world could leave the organization warrants a closer look at the future of global health governance.
What is global health governance?
According to the WHO, global health actors themselves do not sufficiently coordinate their activities with each other or other host countries, leading to fragmentation and unpredictability. Addressing this issue, the WHO aims to facilitate a coherent global health governance framework that clarifies national and global health responsibilities enables countries to effectively carry them out and creates accountability for these responsibilities. Essentially, global health governance is a coherent system of states and their partners with the common interest of defending against transnational health threats, containing infectious diseases where they emerge and avoiding the international spread of health hazards.
Why does the United States want to leave?
According to a spokesperson for the US Department of State, “the World Health Organization has failed badly by those measures, not only in its response to COVID-19 but to other health crises in recent decades. In addition, WHO has declined to adopt urgently needed reforms.” As a result, President Trump has started to seek “more credible and transparent partners”. Since his announcement in May that the US’ withdrawal will take effect on July 6, 2021, the U.S. government has been actively working to identify other partners and assume the activities previously undertaken by WHO, effectively plunging the future of global health governance into uncertainty.
As a part of the withdrawal process, the Trump administration has also started to redirect American resources, including reprogramming the remaining balance of its planned the Fiscal Year 2020 assessed WHO contributions to other UN assessments. In addition, through July 2021, the United States will scale down its engagement with the WHO, including reassigning the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailees currently working in WHO headquarters and offices. US participation in WHO technical meetings and events will be determined on a “case-by-case basis.”
What effect will this have on global health governance?
The decision to withdraw the United States from the WHO was not in hopes of improving the United Nations specialized agency, but to assign blame for the United States’ failure to protect its citizens from the coronavirus. The Atlantic explains that “his own administration’s failure to react adequately to warnings from the WHO” caused President Trump to need a scapegoat, and unfortunately, he chose the unfamiliar acronym—WHO.
Although the WHO has become a household phrase during coronavirus lockdowns, dealing with global pandemics is not the only task they oversee. Aside from its role in pandemics, the organization facilitates the scientific exchange, compilation, and distribution of international research results. It also provides medicines, vaccines, and health advice to the developing world and is especially important in countries that do not have their own pharmaceutical industry.
The United States' withdrawal from the WHO will deal with a huge financial blow to the organization. Specifically, they will lose $893 million—15% of the entire budget and more than twice as much as any other country if the United States does withdraw. This imbalance of funding has been the norm for decades and subsequently put the U.S. at the center of the world’s most important public-health apparatus. Then came Donald Trump, COVID-19, and ultimately the year’s notice that the United States is intending to leave the organization, as required under US law.
What happens now?
The US has already given the one year’s notice and set its exit for July 6, 2021. Now it must meet its financial obligations to the organization for the current year. Therefore, at the least, nothing would really change until mid-2021, by which point Trump may no longer be President and his successor may revoke the decision, or until the U.S. pays off the $60 million it currently owes the WHO. Especially considering that President-Elect Biden has already signaled his intention to bring the United States back into WHO as well as numerous other international agreements that were abandoned during President Trump’s tenure as President of the United States, the US is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Even if the United States were to ultimately leave the WHO in 2021, the effectiveness of that decision is not widely supported because one of the Trump Administration’s main reasons for leaving the WHO is the failure of the WHO to demonstrate “its independence from the Chinese Communist Party”. However, an American withdrawal from the WHO will allow for China’s influence to grow not only inside the WHO and the UN but in the international community itself.
The Atlantic ultimately poses the ultimatum that “post-Trump, whether in 2021 or 2025, some will argue for a return to the status quo—for the U.S. to rejoin the Human Rights Council and the WHO; to sign on once again to the Paris Agreement; and to recommit to the old language of universal rights, transparency, and accountability. But the next administration may well discover that some of the UN’s institutions, created for another era, cannot be saved. Even if a President Joe Biden chants the old mantras, everyone now knows that his successors might not. Maybe someday President Mike Pompeo, or President Tom Cotton, or President Tucker Carlson will flip everything up in the air again. Knowing this is still possible, our allies will be wary of committing to any cause that we back.”
Discussion Questions
Will President-Elect Biden be able to salvage America’s standing on the world stage?
Should the United States withdraw from the WHO?
Has the WHO been successful in the fight against COVID-19?
How has COVID-19 weakened global health governance?
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