WHO chief asks for help pushing US to reconsider its withdrawal from health agency
The World Health Organization (WHO) chief asked global leaders to pressure the US to reverse President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the UN health agency, which will squeeze health programmes in Europe and beyond.
But countries also pressed WHO at a key budget meeting last Wednesday about how it might cope with the exit of its biggest donor, according to internal meeting materials obtained by The Associated Press.
A German envoy, Bjorn Kummel, warned that “the roof is on fire, and we need to stop the fire as soon as possible”.
For 2024-2025, the US is WHO’s biggest donor by far, putting in an estimated $988 million (€949.7 million), roughly 14 per cent of WHO’s $6.9 billion budget (€6.6 billion).
A budget document presented at the meeting showed WHO’s health emergencies programme has a “heavy reliance” on American cash.
For example, “readiness functions” in WHO’s Europe office were more than 80 per cent reliant on the $154 million (€148 million) contributed by the US.
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The document said US funding “provides the backbone of many of WHO's large-scale emergency operations,” covering up to 40 per cent.
It said responses in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan were at risk, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars lost by polio eradication and HIV programmes.
The US also covers 95 per cent of WHO's tuberculosis work in Europe and more than 60 per cent of TB efforts in Africa, the Western Pacific, and at the agency headquarters in Geneva, the document said.
Since Trump’s executive order, WHO has attempted to withdraw funds from the US for past expenses, WHO finance director George Kyriacou said, but most of those “have not been accepted”.
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The US also has yet to settle its owed contributions to WHO for 2024, pushing the agency into a deficit, he added.
WHO's leader wants to bring back the US
Last week, officials at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were instructed to stop working with WHO immediately.
“We would appreciate it if you continue to push and reach out to them to reconsider,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged member countries at the budget meeting.
Among other health crises, WHO is currently working to stop outbreaks of Marburg virus in Tanzania, Ebola in Uganda, and mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Tedros rebutted Trump’s three stated reasons for leaving the agency in the executive order signed on January 20 – Trump's first day back in office.
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In the order, Trump said WHO mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic that began in China, failed to adopt needed reforms, and that US membership required “unfairly onerous payments”.
Tedros said WHO alerted the world in January 2020 about the potential dangers of the coronavirus and has made dozens of reforms since, including efforts to expand its donor base.
“Bringing the US back will be very important," he told meeting attendees. "And on that, I think all of you can play a role”.
Kummel, a senior advisor on global health in Germany's health ministry, described the US exit as “the most extensive crisis WHO has been facing in the past decades”.
Officials from countries including Bangladesh and France asked what specific plans WHO had to deal with the loss of US funding and wondered which health programmes would be cut as a result.
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The AP obtained a document shared among some WHO senior managers that laid out several options, including a proposal that each major department or office might be slashed in half by the end of the year.
Reshaping global health leadership
Some experts said that while the departure of the US was a major crisis, it might also serve as an opportunity to reshape global public health.
Less than 1 per cent of the US health budget goes to WHO, said Matthew Kavanagh, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics.
Kavanagh also said the WHO is "massively underfunded,” describing the contributions from rich countries as “peanuts”.
WHO emergencies chief Dr Michael Ryan said at the meeting on the impact of the US withdrawal last week that losing the US was “terrible,” but member states had “tremendous capacity to fill in those gaps”.
