US cuts ties with WHO, raising flu epidemic concerns

The United States has terminated its partnership with the World Health Organization, the Trump administration said Thursday, raising concerns about how it will combat flu and other diseases.

The move follows an executive order Trump issued on the first day of his second term last January saying the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO within a year. In recent days the Trump administration has also withdrawn the U.S. from dozens of other international organizations, including global climate talks, and established a Board of Peace chaired by Trump that critics say could undermine the United Nations.

“This action responds to the WHO’s failures during the Covid-19 pandemic and seeks to rectify the harm from those failures inflicted on the American people,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the WHO said members of its executive board would discuss how to handle the U.S. withdrawal at their meeting next month. Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that the withdrawal would make both the U.S. and the rest of the world less safe.

“It’s not really the right decision. I want to say it bluntly,” he told reporters.

Rubio and Kennedy said the U.S. would continue to lead the world in public health, and that it would work with countries and “trusted health institutions” using a more transparent model that “delivers real outcomes rather than the bloated and inefficient bureaucracy of the WHO.”

In a call with reporters earlier Thursday, HHS officials provided no details about whether those institutions have the laboratory credentials necessary for surveillance of emerging diseases.

“We’ve done an analysis. We have plans in place,” said one of the officials, whom HHS did not allow to speak on the record.

Infectious disease experts warned that the exit from WHO is likely to leave dangerous blind spots in disease surveillance and preparedness — particularly when it comes to one of the most vexing and deadly illnesses the U.S. encounters every year: the flu.

The break-up comes ahead of an annual meeting the WHO convened to discuss which flu strains vaccine manufacturers should include in next season’s shots. The U.S. has long played a major role in the meeting.

HHS officials declined to say whether the U.S. will participate in the meeting, scheduled for Feb. 27.

The U.S. is in the middle of a nasty flu season. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 18 million people have been sickened so far and that nearly 10,000 people, including 32 children, have died.

Jesse Bump, a global public health expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called the administration’s action “an act of monumental stupidity.”

“The reason this matters, in the most immediate sense, is that WHO has a network of 127 laboratories all around the world, and those laboratories detect and sequence flu strains,” Bump said. “WHO is sort of like a library, and the U.S. has had a card to walk right in, get the information you want. We no longer have access. We don’t have that library card.”

Dr. Judd Walson, chair of the department of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it’s extraordinarily difficult to compare infectious disease notes between countries without a unifying group like WHO.

“If you have a big surge in a particular disease like flu in country A and you don’t see it in country B but they’re using different diagnostics, they’re sampling different populations, it’s impossible to make those comparisons,” Walson said.

Such surveillance is particularly useful when it comes to flu strains that pop up, like the H3N2 subclade K strain that has dominated the spread of flu so far this year.

The exit from WHO has been in the works since the first Trump administration. As the coronavirus pandemic took hold in April 2020, Trump accused the WHO of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the crisis — specifically the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China.

Rubio and Kennedy echoed those accusations in their statement Thursday, saying the WHO “obstructed the timely and accurate sharing of critical information that could have saved American lives.”

They also said the WHO had refused to return the U.S. flag hanging outside its headquarters in Geneva, “arguing it has not approved our withdrawal and, in fact, claims that we owe it compensation.”

The WHO says the U.S., traditionally its biggest financial contributor, has not paid the $260 million in fees it owes for 2024 and 2025, in violation of U.S. law.

Stephanie Psaki, a distinguished senior fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health who was coordinator for global health security during the Biden administration, said she’s concerned that pulling out of the WHO will leave the U.S. more vulnerable than even before the pandemic.

“These decisions are not being made based on a strategy or a plan to protect Americans. They’re being made, it seems to me, based on frustrations or vendettas from six years ago,” Psaki said. “That is scary.”