Trump is making the right call in leaving the WHO

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization, the United Nations agency charged with supporting global health. Last week, he finalized that action, ending all funding, personnel support, and formal engagements.

Trump’s action is hardly precipitous. In fact, when he indicated his desire to disengage from the WHO in 2020, he noted that his decision was largely driven by the organization’s profoundly poor performance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent refusals to reform itself.

Based on the record, the president is making the right decision.

Amidst the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO failed in its crucial mission. Following a comprehensive two-year investigation into the government’s response to the pandemic, including sworn testimony, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded:

While WHO is supposed to support the entire world, during COVID-19 pandemic, it appeared to protect its relationship with the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party). The WHO was misinformed, denied access to China, and was used as cover for CCP’s reckless actions. At a time when the globe was turning to the WHO for leadership and advice, the WHO’s actions showed that it did not support all its members equally. What was seen was an organization that, rather than serving all humankind, became beholden to and entrapped in politics.

The Record. Look at the record. On Jan. 14, 2020, for example, the WHO told the world that COVID-19 was “not transmissible” from human to human. The WHO’s communication of this false information was based on what communist Chinese officials were telling it, and it naively trusted them.

In fact, one of the outstanding features of this deadly pathogen was its impressive contagiousness. The novel coronavirus had been circulating and infecting persons in China and elsewhere as early as the fall of 2019. It had been spreading rapidly, and COVID-19 antibodies even showed up in blood samples in Veneto, Italy, as early as Sept. 3, 2019.

On Dec. 31, 2019, as the subcommittee reported, the WHO ignored warnings from Taiwan about strange “pneumonia” cases showing up in Wuhan Province, China. Meanwhile, the Chinese communists were underreporting cases and deaths, crushing internal dissent, and threatening Chinese medical professionals and journalists who deviated from the official line on the novel coronavirus. The communist regime, however, insisted on maintaining normal air travel from China to other parts of the world, including the United States.

The Human Cost. In the face of a global health threat, the WHO is supposed to issue a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.” Such a declaration is the equivalent of a “red alert,” putting nations on notice and enabling them to prepare individually and collectively to take measures to control the spread of a dangerous disease.

Our Central Intelligence Agency and German intelligence both found that the Chinese communists threatened WHO officials if they declared a global emergency, saying that they would end China’s role in any international effort to combat the novel coronavirus.

So, as the subcommittee further reported, the WHO delayed and did not declare a global emergency until Jan. 30, 2020: “By the time the WHO declared COVID-19 a PHIEC on January 30, 2020, the disease infected almost 10,000 and killed almost 1000 people in 19 different countries. It was reported that the delay in PHEIC declaration was a result of intense pressure from the [Chinese Communist Party].”

Even so, the WHO, while praising Communist China’s efforts to combat the coronavirus at home, opposed travel restrictions to contain the contagion. Congressional investigators noted that between Dec. 31, 2019, and Jan. 31, 2020, there were 430,000 passengers who flew from China to the United States.

On Jan. 31, 2020, Trump imposed a travel ban on China. While Dr. Anthony Fauci told Congress that Trump’s decisive action undoubtedly saved American lives, Trump’s critics, of course, accused him of “racism.”

A Joke. It got worse. In January 2021, the WHO assembled a team of 17 international experts to visit Wuhan, China, and inquire into the then-mysterious origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Chinese communists denied participation of any American scientists, except Dr. Peter Daszak, a friendly collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on risky coronavirus research funded by American taxpayers.

China’s scientists, incidentally, comprised roughly half of the team of international investigators. A “balanced” approach.

The team was denied access to the raw data, interviews with personnel were limited, and access to lab facilities. As the subcommittee also reported:

A significant restriction was the CCP’s complete control over every single aspect of the investigation team’s itinerary and access to information. Upon arriving in Wuhan, the WHO team quarantined for two weeks in hotel rooms and were further restricted to certain areas of the hotel after quarantining. The investigators were restricted from dining with their Chinese counterparts, a seemingly insignificant detail, yet denied the WHO team the opportunity to engage in informal, human-to-human, conversation that can provide invaluable information.

This entire process was a joke. While the WHO report entertained various scenarios as to the origin of the deadly coronavirus—transmission from animal to human, through an unidentified intermediate animal host or food products—the hypothesis of a laboratory origin was dismissed as “extremely unlikely.” In short, the WHO report mirrored the official, pre-determined Chinese Communist Party line.

Compared to the United States, China’s financial contribution to the WHO is a mere pittance. Among member nation states, the U.S. has been the most generous funder of the WHO, with annual American taxpayer subsidies running between $110 million to $123 million over the period 2014 to 2023. But the organization is also funded by voluntary contributions from, for example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Global elites are, of course, a dependable source of “moral” support.

WHO officials are doubtless overjoyed that the state of California will join the agency’s international health network, following America’s departure. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made the announcement while attending the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to the president’s order, is tasked with identifying responsible international partners to join in a cooperative effort to protect global health.

Given the WHO’s multiple failures during the COVID-19 crisis, the time is ripe for a new international effort to respond to pandemics more effectively. In the United Kingdom, for example, British conservatives have already launched “Action on World Health,” an agenda to reform or replace the WHO.

Our friends and allies overseas know, from bitter experience, that together we can and must do better.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]