On day one of his new administration, United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order notifying an intent to withdraw from the World Health Organisation (WHO). This has drawn celebration from some, dismay from others, and probably disinterest from the vast majority of the population more concerned with feeding families and paying off debt. The executive order also leaves much unaddressed, namely the substantive issues that have changed WHO and international public health over the past decade.
Change is certainly needed, and it is good that the WHO’s largest direct funder is expressing real concern. The reactions to the notice of withdrawal also demonstrate the vast gulf between reality and the positions of those on both sides of the WHO debate. The new administration is raising an opportunity for rational debate. If this can be grasped, there is still a chance that the WHO, or an organisation more fit for purpose, could provide broad benefit to the world’s peoples. But the problems underlying the international public health agenda must first be acknowledged for this to become possible.
What actually is the WHO and what did it do?
Despite being the health arm of the United Nations (UN), the WHO is a self-governing body under the 194 countries of the World Health Assembly (WHA). Its 34-member executive board is elected from the WHA. The WHA also elects the Director General (DG), based on ‘one country, one vote’. Its 1946 constitution restricts its governance to states (rather than private individuals and corporations) so in this way it is unique among the major international health agencies. While private individuals and corporations can buy influence, they can be completely excluded should the WHA so wish.
With 8,000 staff, the WHO is split into six regions and a head office in Geneva, Switzerland. The regional office of the Americas, also called the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), is based in Washington DC and preceded the WHO, having been established in 1902 as the International Sanitary Bureau. Like other regional offices, PAHO has its own regional assembly, obviously dominated by the US, and is largely self-governing under the wider WHO and UN system.
The WHO is funded by countries and non-state entities. While countries are required to provide ‘assessed’ or core funding, most of the budget is derived from voluntary funding provided by countries and private or corporate donors. Nearly all voluntary funding is ‘specified’, comprising 75% of the total budget. Under specified funding, WHO must do the funders’ bidding. Most of WHO’s activities are therefore specified by its funders, not WHO itself, with a quarter of this being private people and corporations with strong Pharma interests.
Therefore WHO, while governed by countries, has effectively become a tool of others – both state and non-state interests. The US is the largest direct funder (around 15%), but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is a close second (14%), and the partly Gates-funded Gavi public-private partnership (PPP) is third. Thus, Mr Gates arguably has the largest influence in terms of specifying the WHO’s actual activities. The European Union and World Bank are also major funders, as is Germany and the United Kingdom (i.e., the remaining large Western Pharma countries).
In response to its funders, the WHO has shifted focus to areas where large Pharma profits can be accrued. Pharma must insist on this as it has a fiduciary responsibility to maximise return on investment for its shareholders by using its WHO connections to sell more product. The obvious way to make lots of money in Pharma is by spreading fear of vaccine-preventable diseases, and then making vaccines and selling them free from liability to as large a market as possible. This was highly effective during the COVID-19 response, and the WHO is now sponsored by these interests to implement the surveil-lockdown-mass vaccinate paradigm behind the recent amendments to the International Health Regulations and the draft pandemic agreement.
While a shamefully willing tool, the WHO is not driving this. The US started the IHR amendment process and heavily backed it until the recent change of administration. The new administration, while signalling an intent to withdraw from WHO, has not signalled a withdrawal from the pandemic industrial complex the US helped develop.
Critical to understanding the US withdrawal is the fact that the COVID-19 outbreak and response would have looked almost identical if WHO did not exist. WHO was not involved in the gain-of-function research, in vaccine development or in vaccine mandates. It abrogated its own ethical principles and prior recommendations in pushing lockdowns and mass vaccination, and did huge harm in the process. However, it was countries that funded and conducted the virus modification that likely spawned COVID-19. It was countries, in concert with Pharma, that mandated lockdowns on their people and pushed vaccination most heavily (the WHO never recommended the COVID-19 vaccines for children).
This is not a defence of WHO – the organisation was incompetent, dishonest and negligent during COVID-19. It was a public health disgrace. It has continued to deliberately mislead countries regarding future pandemic risk and inflated return-on-investment claims in order to sell the policies that benefit its sponsors. But remove the WHO, the World Bank (the main funder of the pandemic agenda), the PPPs looking to sell pandemic vaccines (Gavi and CEPI), the Gates Foundation, Germany, the UK, the EU and the US health ‘swamp’ itself, and Pharma with its compliant media will still exist. Pharmaceutical companies have other options to bring a veneer of legitimacy to their pillaging through public health.
The US notice of withdrawal
As President Trump’s 20th January order of withdrawal notes, it repeats an executive order from mid-2020 that was subsequently revoked by President Biden. In theory it takes at least 12 months for a withdrawal to take effect, based on the Joint Resolution of Congress in 1948 through which the US joined, subsequently agreed by the WHA. However, as the new executive order is intended to revoke the Biden revocation, the remaining time to run is unclear. The waiting period could also be shortened by a further Act of Congress.
The 2025 notice of withdrawal is interesting, as the reasons given for withdrawal are relatively benign. There are four:
- Mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak and other (unspecified) global health crises. The “mishandling” is undefined, but may include WHO support for China in obscuring COVID-19 origins as highlighted in the recent COVID-19 House of Representatives sub-committee report. There are few obvious candidates for other truly global health crises that WHO mishandled, except perhaps the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak and monkeypox, unless the executive order refers to any international (global) public health issue (in which case there are many).
- Failure to adopt urgently needed reforms. These are undefined. Of concern, the only reforms the US has been pushing on the WHO in the past few years (pre-Trump administration) were intended to increase the authority of the WHO over sovereign states and the authority of its work. The recent Republican-dominated House sub-committee report recommended the same.
- Inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states. This is presumably aimed at China, but is also concerning, as WHO is subject to its member states through the WHA. It would be strange if the US was hoping to free WHO from such constraints. There is no mention of private sector involvement, now about 25% of WHO funding, that many would claim is the core reason for the corruption and deterioration of the WHO’s work.
- Unfairly onerous payments by the US. The US provides 22% of WHO’s assessed (core funding) but this is only a fraction of US payments. The vast majority of US payments have been entirely voluntary, and the US could presumably choose to stop these at any time, removing most of its funding but not its voting rights. With China listed by WHO as paying less than Somalia and Nigeria in the current 2024-25 biennium (per mid-January 2025), the US has a reasonable gripe here, but a simple one to fix.
Missing from the executive order is any reference to the other promoters of the pandemic or emergency agenda. The World Bank’s Pandemic Fund is untouched by this executive order, as are the PPPs. CEPI (vaccines for pandemics) and Gavi (vaccines in general) provide private industry and investors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with direct decision-making roles they cannot ensure through WHO.
The executive order requires the Director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy to “review, rescind and replace the 2024 US Global Health Security Strategy”. It is hoped that this signals a recognition of the lack of an evidence base and financial rigour around the current policy. Indeed, the policy promoted by the US, WHO, the World Bank and PPPs is irrelevant, by design, to a laboratory-released pathogen such as that which probably caused COVID-19. The actual mortality from natural outbreaks that it is designed for has been declining for over a century.
Implications of withdrawal
A full withdrawal of the US from WHO will presumably reduce US influence within the organisation, enhancing that of the EU, China and the private sector. As it ignores the World Bank and the PPPs, it will not greatly affect the pandemic agenda’s momentum. COVID-19 would still have happened had the US been out of the WHO before 2020, mRNA mass vaccination would still have been driven by countries and Pharma with the help of a compliant media. The WHO acted as a propagandist and helped waste billions, but never advocated vaccine mandates or mass vaccination of children. Though the WHO was appalling, the driving forces behind the wealth concentration and human rights abuses of the COVID-19 era clearly originated elsewhere
If the US withdraws its 15% of the WHO budget – about $600 million per year – others (e.g. EU, Gavi, Gates Foundation) could fill the gap. The executive order mentions withdrawing US contractors, but these are few. Nearly all WHO staff are directly employed, not seconded from governments. The main effect will be to reduce coordination with agencies such as the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The US will have a continuing need to use WHO services, such as for prequalification (regulation) of hundreds of millions of dollars of commodities bought and distributed by USAID and related programmes but not regulated through the FDA. This is not a problem – the WHO lists are public – but the US would simply continue to use WHO services without paying for or influencing them.
The withdrawal notice also mentions cessation of US involvement in negotiating the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) and the Pandemic Agreement. The IHR negotiations concluded eight months ago, and the US has until July 19th (10 months after receipt of the WHO’s notification letter of September 2024) to signal rejection. The IHR are separate from WHO membership. The Pandemic Agreement is subject to wide disagreement between countries, and it is unclear whether it will go forward. However, provisions in the FY23 US National Defence Authorisation Act (page 950 to 961) are already stronger than the US would be signing up to with these WHO agreements.
The history of US withdrawals from UN institutions is also one of subsequent re-entry after a change in administration. Leaving the WHO without US influence will presumably make it even less like what the Trump administration would like, should history should repeat itself and the next administration re-join.
The hope is that the US withdrawal will force major reform within the WHO – one of the key reasons provided in the withdrawal notice. However, there is no hint in the executive order of the desired direction of change, or whether the US will adopt a more rational pandemic policy. If such an intent were made clear, other countries would follow and the WHO itself may actually reboot. However, withdrawing without addressing these fallacies underlying the pandemic agenda entrenches the vested interests who profited through COVID-19 and clearly aim to continue doing so.
Being real about reality
The enthusiasm for the WHO withdrawal seems widely to have forgotten two things:
- The pandemic agenda and the COVID-19 response that exemplified it are not primarily WHO programmes. (The WHO said do essentially the opposite in 2019.)
- The actual pandemic industrial complex of surveil-lockdown-mass vaccinate is already essentially in place and does not need the WHO for it to continue.
The WHO Bio-Hub in Germany is largely a German Government and Pharma agency with a WHO stamp; the World Bank pandemic fund is the main current funding source for pandemic surveillance; the 100 day vaccine programme (CEPI) is directly funded by hapless taxpayers; and the Medical Countermeasures Platform is a partnership between countries, Pharma, the G20 and others. These would probably continue irrespective of WHO’s existence. The pandemic industrial complex made hundreds of billions of dollars through COVID-19 and has capacity and incentive to continue.
The complexity of all this is being addressed on social media by statements such as “The WHO is rotten to the core”, “The WHO is unreformable”, or even “Pure evil” – all unhelpful labels for a complex organisation of 8,000 staff, six fairly independent regional offices and dozens of country offices. The WHO’s work on reducing the distribution of counterfeit drugs saves perhaps hundreds of thousands of people each year, and these people matter. Its standards for tuberculosis and malaria management are followed globally, including by the US. In several countries its technical expertise saves many lives.
The organisation desperately needs reform, as President Trump notes. Its current leadership, having spent the last few years blatantly misleading and lying to countries about COVID-19 and pandemic risk, seem unlikely candidates to help. They have played the tune of private interests over the needs of the world’s people. But the WHO’s structure makes it the only major international health institution that countries alone can actually force to reform. It simply needs sufficient member states of the WHA to force exclusion of private interests and to force WHO back to diseases and programmes that actually have a significant bearing on human wellbeing.
Should such reform prove impossible, then the coalition of countries built around the reform agenda can replace it with a new organisation. The massive bureaucracy that global health has become needs to be seen through the same lens as that in the US. The fantasy built around pandemic risk is not substantively different from many similar fantasies on the domestic agenda that the Trump administration is now targeting. It is similarly erosive of human rights, freedom and human flourishing. Addressing this is an opportunity we would be foolish to miss.
Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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This one must be hard for BJ. He must not want to upset the corporate landlord Tory donors. But then again, he has please a certain crowd to force the message you need to stay at home.
They’ve probably sold off all their commercial property to idiots in local government.
And there are lots of idiots on local government!
Just wait until people start to realise that working from home quickly becomes ‘living at work’. A colleague recently said that they feel like their dining room has become a ‘prison’. We can only hope that the mass hysteria will break soon.
I’ve worked for myself for five years since leaving full-time employment. But I really looked forward to getting out of the house. It’s not all good.
The argument about saving the planet is also not black & white. Consider the cost of heating an open plan modern office of 50 people compared to 50 individuals heating their own home. Plus the office still has to be heated and lit for the handful who have returned to the office. This has to be offset against the cost in fewer miles in the car.
Home office and IT suppliers have done well if they need to duplicate their office set-up at home.
I think it varies a lot. For me, working from home has been pretty good, I don’t mind it. It allows me to spread an 8 hour work day over more time, with lots of tiny breaks in between. That works for me, but I realise it doesn’t work for a lot of people.
That does sound beneficial. But with a nasty control freak manager it isn’t possible.
I would have considerable difficulty fitting the thirty foot curved desk, and twelve video screens with keyboards etc plus multple servers in my front room.
Definitely varies. I’m retired, however the young couple next door both have London based jobs.
One of them is able to work flexible hours and delighted to be back in the office three days a week. The other, however, with a more 9 to 5 role, would be happy to take a pay cut to avoid having to endure nearly 15 hours a week on Southern Rail again.
Working from home, is not the same as having to work at home day in, day out. I’ve done the former for a large part of the last 25 years or so. In the last 18 months, I’ve had to do mostly the latter. It sucks and isn’t practical for somebody like me, who is well used to it. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like for a single parent in a small flat.
There are plus and minus points to it.
If working for yourself then sometimes you can choose what you do, and when and how, you do it.
If employed by an organisation, particularly a larger one, then the flexibility probably is much less, and whatever part of your home you use will then seem like “being at work” even if not at that time.
The biggest problem I can see is that many people, previously unused to working from home, will, over time, probably become more remote in their thinking as they are not getting the “atmosphere” of working and (hopefully) co-operating with others, as they do when working physically alongside them.
The temptation to develop “sloping shoulders” will also probably increase, as seems to have happened with GPs and others in the NHS, with the current common “remote” contact practice…
I’m not sure this genie can be put back in the bottle. Not whilst we still have a mentality of mass testing of healthy people and the fear that’s been deeply instilled in people.
We’re still mass testing healthy people?!! What the hell for?
Don’t know – is there any precedent for doing this “just in case testing” for a virus you might have a virus in you? I can pretty much say for certainty that if you went to see your doctor two years ago and asked for a test, they would ask “Have you got any symptoms?”. If the answer was “No, I just fancied getting a test”, you would have been shown the door.
If Covid was clearly more deadly, there might be some smidgen of sense. But it isn’t…
Johnson and Co are working hand in glove with Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab et al putting into effect the plan for near total genocide of the global masses and yet somehow people expect the tireless PM to find time to worry about the profitability of some peripheral service businesses in the city. Come on give him a break, Johnson has much bigger fish to fry.
I’m not sure who actually wants to go back into the office except for those with inadequate facilities at home or the hyper social types. Our office is open but mostly its the twenty somethings plus the sales guys who can’t sit still that have gone in.
I have no particular interest in going in whilst Covid and vaccines remain a topic deemed worthy of discussion (although by now vaccines don’t come up much actually – it’s just assumed that you’ve had it).
It works both ways though…the bedwetters are too scared to go back to the office because certain death. All being continually whipped up by the Trade Union. And then there’s people like me who don’t want to go back to the office because they’ve introduced a whole raft of ludicrous “safety” measures in order to appease the sheeples, that do nothing except make the day absolutely unbearable. I went in to collect something a while ago and all I could utter was “it looks like there’s been Novichok”. They’ve taken away the best bit of the office too so I can’t even hide in the kitchen and make tea anymore
As a contractor I will make sure to include in future contracts a clause that I will not attend any meetings that require either vaccination status checks or masks. If more people did the same, I suspect the issue of “vaccine passports” would solve itself pretty quickly.
An admirable stance – but you might find you don’t get many contracts.
Indeed, even if my company doesn’t wish to make vaccination mandatory for employment (currently it is explicitly stated that both vaxxed and unvaxxed colleagues are welcome into the office. That might change once all the young ones have been double dosed), it won’t take long after we receive the first RfP containing the question “What steps would you take to keep us safe from Covid when we come to your office for meetings?” for it to be mandated “to keep elderly colleagues and client safe” or some such.
Although I expect vaccination passports/requirements will eventually wither on the vine, it could be a year or more from now and for most people that’s a long time without a job.
Depends what field he works in and how in demand the skills are – if it’s something niche they may well accept it.
There’s also the issue of nobody being there. I use our local branch office a lot, but I rarely bother to go to the main office now, which I used to be in several days a week. A lot of the benefit was in talking to people, and there’s hardly anybody there now. Absolutely no point in a 40-mile trek to sit in an empty office when I could sit in the (probably empty) office 10 minutes away! I know a number of colleauges feel similarly.
Latest email from hospital managers today, ask yourself is it possible to work from home and if yes, do so. I, and a couple of others, prefer to work in the office, we are the minority. This sounds like a long term plan with office spaces starting to be reallocated.
Shaftesbury sounds like a great porn nickname.
Whilst I appreciate that the Government messaging has been less than consistent, people need to stop waiting around with their thumb up their a$s for them to tell you what to do.
You are adults. Stop behaving like children and make a decision for yourself!
Anybody with a half functioning brain must consider the odds of another lockdown occurring this winter as being very high indeed. For many people it must now have sunk in that the vaccines aren’t as effective as first advertised. It is very understandable that managers are reluctant to have all staff come in, just to have them forced back into WFH mode a month or two later.
Indeed – a lot of companies are now sitting on the fence waitng to see what happens, and consequently often giving rather vague and contradictory messages to their staff.
If you’re waiting for leadership from Boris on this issue then you’re in for a very long wait. If he was going to grow a pair of balls he’d have done it by now.
What is missing from much analysis that I’ve seen is that there isn’t any point in going in to work to network with your colleagues, if they have decided to work from home that day. You’ll still be doing a zoom call!
What I suspect will happen is that different teams within a workplace will come in to the office on different teams, but that sounds more like a one day a week thing than a two days a week thing.
That takes occupancy up to 20%, add a further 20% for more junior staff who don’t have a good office at home, 10% more senior staff who can’t stand being at home, then 10% for client meetings and similar reasons, and your at 50%.
It seems likely that offshoring will receive a boost too, and greater use of contracting firms. Firms will find a way to vertically de-integrate, by re-parcelling tasks.
Lastly, in the City at least, many of the movers and shakers are 50 years plus. In my industry, our clientele are on average older than that, and invariable work part time. They too must find it quite comfortable working from home, and are more likely to be fearful of Covid.
Businesses wouldn’t be at all confused if they acknowledged that the government are just inept local executors of somebody else’s agenda.
That photo gives new meaning to the expression couch potato.
Isn’t it up to the market to decide whether Work from Home works or not?
Those businesses that make it work will survive and if it is a losing strategy those dragging people three hours in packed vehicles to an office somewhere and trying not to pay them recompense for that time for that will flourish.
Business has changed. The younger generation are perfectly comfortable networking virtually. They’ve been doing it since they were children. It’s all the same to them. It’s the older generation that struggle with the concept that you can’t achieve anything unless you’re breathing the same airspace.
It’s not a matter for government. It’s a matter of negotiation between employers and those they want to work for them.
Slouched on a sofa wearing a mask. Think I may have recently spoken with this muppet via one of the ‘new normal’ call centres. That heffalump is unemployable – FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. – Updated information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
Are all the MP’s scheduled to be back at work and attending the House? Lead by example and all that…I won’t hold my breath.