{"id":197912,"date":"2026-01-24T00:49:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T00:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/us-officially-withdraws-from-the-world-health-organization-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T00:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T00:49:11","slug":"us-officially-withdraws-from-the-world-health-organization-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/us-officially-withdraws-from-the-world-health-organization-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"US officially withdraws from the World Health Organization – USA Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014\u00a0The United States officially left the\u00a0World\u00a0Health\u00a0Organization\u00a0on Thursday, Jan. 22, after a year of warnings that doing so would hurt public\u00a0health\u00a0in the U.S. and globally, saying its decision reflected failures in the U.N.\u00a0health\u00a0agency’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
President\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>\u00a0gave\u00a0notice that the U.S. would quit the\u00a0organization\u00a0on the first day of his presidency in 2025, via an executive order. According to a news release from the U.S.\u00a0Health and State Departments, the United States will only work with the WHO in a limited fashion to effectuate the withdrawal.
“We have no plans to participate as an observer, and we have no plans of rejoining,” a senior government\u00a0health\u00a0official said. The U.S. said it plans to work directly with other countries – rather than through an international\u00a0organization\u00a0– on disease surveillance and other public\u00a0health\u00a0priorities.
Under U.S. law, it was supposed to give one-year notice and pay all outstanding fees – around $260 million – before departing. But a U.S. State Department official disputed that the statute contains a condition that any payment needs to be made before withdrawal.
“The American people have paid more than enough,” a State Department spokesperson said in an email earlier on Thursday.
The Department of\u00a0Health\u00a0and Human Services said in a document released on Thursday that the government had ended its funding contributions to the agency. Trump had exercised his authority to pause the future transfer of any U.S. government resources to the WHO because the\u00a0organization\u00a0had cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, the HHS spokesperson said.
The U.S. flag had been removed from outside the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Thursday, according to witnesses. In recent weeks, the U.S. has moved to exit a number of other United Nations\u00a0organizations, and some fear that Trump’s\u00a0recently launched Board of Peace<\/a>\u00a0could undermine the UN as a whole.
Several WHO critics have also proposed setting up a new agency to replace the\u00a0organization, though a proposal document reviewed by the Trump administration last year instead suggested the U.S. push for reforms and American leadership at WHO.
Over the last year, many global\u00a0health\u00a0experts have urged a rethink, including most recently WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The WHO also said the U.S. has not yet paid the fees it owes for 2024 and 2025. Member states are set to discuss the U.S. departure and how it will be handled at the WHO\u2019s executive board in February, a WHO spokesperson said.
“This is a clear violation of U.S. law,” said Lawrence Gostin, founding director of the O\u2019Neill Institute for Global\u00a0Health\u00a0Law at Georgetown University in Washington, a close observer of the WHO. “But Trump is highly likely to get away with it.”
Bill Gates \u2013 chair of the Gates Foundation, a major funder of global\u00a0health\u00a0initiatives and some of the WHO\u2019s work \u2013 told Reuters at Davos that he did not expect the U.S. to reconsider in the short term.
Gates said he would still advocate for the U.S. to rejoin. “The\u00a0world\u00a0needs the\u00a0World\u00a0Health\u00a0Organization,” he said.
The U.S. departure has sparked a financial crisis that has seen the WHO cut its management team in half and scale back work, cutting budgets across the agency. Washington has traditionally been by far the U.N.\u00a0health\u00a0agency’s biggest financial backer, contributing around 18% of its overall funding. The WHO will also shed around\u00a0a quarter of its staff by the middle of this year.<\/a>
The agency said it has been working with the U.S. and sharing information in the last year. It was unclear how the collaboration will work going forward.
Global\u00a0health\u00a0experts said this posed risks for the U.S., the WHO and the\u00a0world.
\u201cThe U.S. withdrawal from WHO could weaken the systems and collaborations the\u00a0world\u00a0relies on to detect, prevent, and respond to\u00a0health\u00a0threats,\u201d said Kelly Henning, public\u00a0health\u00a0program lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies, a U.S.-based non-profit.
(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge, additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Davos and Michael Erman in New York; Editing by David Gregorio and Bill Berkrot)<\/em><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2014\u00a0The United States officially left the\u00a0World\u00a0Health\u00a0Organization\u00a0on Thursday, Jan. 22, after a year of warnings that doing so would hurt public\u00a0health\u00a0in the U.S. and globally, saying its decision reflected failures in the U.N.\u00a0health\u00a0agency’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic.President\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0gave\u00a0notice that the U.S. would quit the\u00a0organization\u00a0on the first day of his presidency in 2025, via an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":197913,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-197912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}