'Grievous wound': Public health expert decries Trump's day one order
President Donald Trump’s day one order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization as he signed a flurry of new executive actions Monday night is a major hit to the nation’s public health system, according to experts.
Not only does the move erode the nation’s standing as a “global health leader,” but it could also make it more difficult to combat the next virus outbreak, according to a report in The New York Times.
But just hours after returning to the Oval Office for the first time in his new presidency, Trump did just that. He “cited a string of reasons for the withdrawal, including the W.H.O.’s ‘mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic,’ and the ‘failure to adopt urgently needed reforms,’" the Times noted.
Trump has criticized the organization since 2020 when he bashed the NATO agency for its approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. He had taken formal steps in July of that year to withdraw from the organization, but that plan fizzled after he lost the election and former President Joe Biden blocked it from going into effect, the Times reported.
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“Leaving the W.H.O. would mean, among other things, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have no access to the global data that the agency provides,” according to the publication. “When China characterized the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus in 2020, it released the information to W.H.O., which shared it with other nations.”
Taken as a whole, the withdrawal from the U.S. would not only be “a grievous wound” to public health, it would also present an “even deeper wound to American national interests and national security,” Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University, told the Times.
With assistance from the U.S., the World Health Organization came into existence in 1948, the Times report said. Its mission is to “confront the biggest health challenges of our time and measurably advance the well-being of the world’s people,” according to the agency's website.