The world is fighting the most serious pandemic in a century, and the United States is in the process of withdrawing from the only international organization equipped to lead that effort.
President Trump has accused the World Health Organization, which is made up of 194 member countries (including the United States), of failing to sound the alarm about the coronavirus quickly enough, of helping the Chinese government cover up the severity of the virus’s threat, and of being too deferential to China in general. He froze federal funding for the organization in April. In May, he gave the W.H.O.’s leaders 30 days to make unspecified improvements, and then — before that time was up, and as the American death toll from Covid-19 topped 100,000 — he decided to withdraw from the group altogether.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump can withdraw from the organization without congressional approval, but a senior administration official recently told Politico that the decision was final.
There are several problems with the president’s critiques. First, his charge that W.H.O. officials abetted a cover-up is false. The organization first warned the world of a mysterious outbreak in China on Jan. 4, following up with a larger report the next day. In the following weeks, it sent a delegation from the W.H.O. Asia office to Wuhan and warned that the virus might be spreading from human to human. By the end of January, officials had declared a global emergency, the strongest warning the W.H.O. can issue.
Mr. Trump downplayed the severity of the threat, repeatedly and publicly, long after the W.H.O. had sounded those alarm bells.
Second, the W.H.O.’s deference to China is no different than its deference to the United States — or any other member country. The W.H.O. is a convening body and a technical resource, not a global regulator or enforcer. Its members, the United States chief among them, designed the organization that way.
But the bigger problem is this: Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the organization will leave the United States and the rest of the world in a much worse position to tackle health threats like this coronavirus.
The World Health Organization was founded in 1948, when the memory of global war was fresh and the importance of global cooperation so evident it needed no justification. The group boasts an impressive roster of achievements, including the eradication of small pox, the near-eradication of polio and a massive expansion of basic health care services in low-income countries.
Its track record of responding to emergencies is uneven, to be sure. The agency’s slow-footed and uncoordinated response to the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 was largely to blame for that outbreak’s severity (more than 11,000 people died in the space of two years). But the organization has worked to correct its course in recent years, under the stewardship of Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
While the group has certainly made mistakes in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, those mistakes are a far cry from the dark and deliberate obfuscations that the administration has accused it of. Earlier this week, for example, W.H.O. officials mistakenly asserted that asymptomatic transmission of the virus was “very rare.” But the group remedied the situation exactly as one would hope: by acknowledging the error quickly and openly, and by correcting it promptly.
Some global policy experts say that because the United States joined the W.H.O. by treaty, the president will need congressional approval to leave it. But previous presidents have withdrawn from treaties without lawmakers’ approval. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has argued that withholding funds earmarked for the W.H.O. is as illegal as it was, last year, for Mr. Trump to temporarily withhold funds from Ukraine. But most of the $400 million or so that the United States gives each year to the W.H.O. is discretionary and could go to any global health endeavor that the president chooses. As the journal Nature notes, the Trump administration has already proposed a new initiative under the auspices of the State Department, the President’s Response to Outbreaks, that would presumably serve this purpose.
But just because Mr. Trump may have legal standing to take the country out of the W.H.O. doesn’t mean he should. Any new program his administration comes up with would be no substitute for the existing global agency. Further siloing public health efforts will only add confusion and complexity to a crisis response that’s already desperate for better coordination.
There are also some things that the United States cannot do on its own. It was only through the W.H.O., for example, that American scientists were able to visit China to see the country’s coronavirus response firsthand. The United States Agency for International Development has funneled much of its pandemic response funding through the W.H.O. for exactly this reason.
The White House seems to understand this: According to ProPublica, even as the administration was freezing W.H.O. funds and contemplating a full withdrawal from the organization, it was still leaning on W.H.O. officials for expert guidance. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was worried enough about the impact of funding freezes that he asked the president to exempt several countries, including Libya, Syria, Sudan and Egypt. State Department officials also warned the president that defunding W.H.O. programs could be disastrous, not only for efforts to contain the coronavirus, but for other longer-standing efforts, including to eradicate polio, in which the U.S. already has invested hundreds of millions of dollars. If those efforts falter now, all of that investment will be lost. Pulling out of the W.H.O. also will severely limit the administration’s ability to influence international drug pricing regimes and vaccine distribution efforts, including for the coronavirus.
The W.H.O. does have problems that ought to be addressed. The scope of its mission has long since outgrown its budget, which is increasingly made up of donations from member countries that can only be used for specific programs. The organization’s split directives — it is both an agency of impartial scientific experts and one whose business is inherently political — continue to undermine its successes. And it is still, for all it has achieved in the past 70 years, a creaking bureaucracy.
But withdrawing from the W.H.O. in the middle of a global pandemic is a terrible solution to those problems. Instead, the United States and other member nations — like Brazil, which also recently threatened to leave the organization — should try seeing the W.H.O. for what it is: a reflection of the countries that created it and that wrote its bylaws. If they don’t like what they see, they should work to improve that reflection.
They might start by strengthening the international health regulations that guide the W.H.O.’s response to infectious disease outbreaks. Those regulations are sensible on their face: In exchange for openness about emerging disease threats within a country’s borders, that country is guaranteed certain protections, including that other nations will refrain from cutting off the affected region from travel and trade. But such rules are effectively unenforceable. Individual countries routinely violate the edicts that don’t suit them, and the W.H.O. has almost no recourse when that happens. If the organization had more sticks to wield — if there were penalties for defying its previously agreed-upon rules — it might not have to meet the duplicity and delay it sometimes encounters with so much patient praise.
The nations critical of the W.H.O. might also consider investing more money, instead of less. The organization’s two-year budget of $4.85 billion is inadequate for the tasks it will face in that time. The United States currently covers roughly 15 percent of that budget. If the president is truly worried about China’s influence on the organization — and on the global stage — he should not leave such an easy spot for that country to step into.
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