There is really no one in Washington to argue with. Europe and others have to pick up the slack, until the fever lifts. Maybe in November.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization last month was that it was not a shock and indeed went hardly noticed. For those who missed it, distracted by murders by federal agents and White House threats to attack Denmark, the Trump Administration did this on January 22, 2026, marking the first exit in the organization’s 78-year history.
The move made good on a directive signed by Trump on January 20, 2025, which was apparently urgent for him on the day he took office – a deliberate act of sabotage by an administration that treats expertise as a threat. The order complained about the US paying too much, accused the WHO of mishandling COVID, and said the organization was not independent of members’ politics.
Trump hates multilateralism – it is, along with tariffs, one of his idees fixes over the decades – and loves national sovereignty (except for other countries in the Americas – the “Donroe Doctrine”). But here’s the thing: Measles, polio, flu variants, and drug-resistant TB don’t respect borders. Stopping them overseas is cheaper, safer, and politically easier than managing outbreaks at home.
The move is, of course, part of a broader confrontation with the postwar public-health consensus, as Trump and his Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have reframed vaccination not as a collective safeguard but as a matter of personal choice that they are hugely skeptical of. Consequently the US has seen a resurgence of measles, which was declared eliminated nationally in 2000. Public-health officials warn this is just the beginning: There are actually people now, their brains addled by propaganda, who don’t like the polio vaccine either.
In effect, the WHO withdrawal and the war on vaccines reinforced one another – ideologically driven nonsense, devastating to public health, promoted with supreme confidence.
The WHO withdrawal in itself is so phenomenally stupid that one cannot rule out that Trump will eventually reverse it once he can claim a “better deal.” But as things stand, America now rejects global coordination on disease surveillance, immunization standards, and outbreak response – thus shooting itself in the foot. Here’s how and why (read more here):
- The WHO acts as the world’s early-warning system for disease. Through global surveillance networks, the WHO detects outbreaks — cholera, Ebola, polio, influenza variants — often weeks before they reach US borders. That intelligence feeds directly into national preparedness, vaccine targeting, and hospital planning.
- Second, the WHO coordinates standards. When vaccines, diagnostics, or treatments are developed, the WHO harmonizes safety protocols, clinical trial benchmarks, and data sharing so countries are not reinventing the wheel in crises. This speeds deployment and reduces regulatory chaos during pandemics.
- Third, it provides on-the-ground operational capacity. During outbreaks in fragile states, the WHO supplies labs, logistics, trained personnel, and cold-chain infrastructure. That containment abroad is not charity—it prevents global spread that would otherwise arrive by plane.
- Fourth, the WHO protects US leverage. By shaping global health norms, the United States influences rules on data transparency, biosecurity, and outbreak reporting. Withdrawal cedes that influence to rivals who may prefer opacity. Memo to the stable genius: Like China.
Sure, the WHO could use reforms. It’s a UN agency! But you fight for them from within. Is the funding breakdown not quite right? Argue that case separately, not by burning down the world.
WHO’s contributor data shows the United States was the organization’s top donor in 2022–2023, contributing $1.284 billion across assessed and voluntary funding, representing 15.6% of WHO’s total revenue in that period. Yes, that is a lot. It is also, on an annual basis, just a little above that of the building of Trump’s Versaillan White House ballroom (collected from rich donors who are, make no mistake, seeking and getting costly government favors). The UK, with about $400 million, spent about the same as the US per capita. The spending has to do with the size of an economy – and much of it was anyway voluntary.
By the way, Germany, at $856 million, actually contributed not only almost as much but almost three times more per capita. A similar figure also came from the Gates Foundation. That may sound like a lot until you figure that it is the annual interest on the fortune of an individual named Jeff Bezos, who last week fired a third of the journalists at his Washington Post, certainly pleasing Trump.
So: Washington’s decision pulls support from the institution that coordinates global disease surveillance, outbreak response, and the technical norms that make cross-border cooperation possible. You can dislike WHO’s bureaucracy and still understand the basic reality: when an outbreak hits, the world needs an operating system. The US just unplugged the one we have. Faced with this insanity, the world – and to a large extent Europe – now faces a choice: either step into the vacuum, or accept a weaker global health system where everyone is in danger.
Here’s what should happen.
Europe’s response so far has been concern without action, which does not keep laboratories funded or outbreak teams deployable. America truly cannot be fixed while Trump is around and Republicans control Congress – so this problem is with us for at least a year and probably three — constituting a test for specific bodies with specific levers: the European Commission as a fiscal and diplomatic actor, national ministries of health as the budget-holders and implementers, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is the technical nerve center that now must operate with more authority than it currently has.
It’s not just money. Europe cannot replace America’s scientific ecosystem overnight — but it can prevent a collapse in coordination by doing three things immediately: fund core surveillance, expand cross-border clinical trial capacity, and align with other parts of the world to work around America’s tantrum.
The costs of failure are asymmetrical: one weak link in surveillance can become everyone’s problem. The IMF has repeatedly described COVID-era damage in trillion-dollar terms — expecting the pandemic to cost the global economy $12.5 trillion through 2024. That’s 10,000 times the annual US contribution to the WHO.
The results are already becoming clear. In Davos, Moderna’s CEO said the company does not foresee investing in new late-stage vaccine trials in the near term because you “cannot make a return on investment” without access to the US market and predictable policy support — and he explicitly tied the shift to rising US hostility and regulatory uncertainty. Yup: a company central to the mRNA revolution is publicly saying the US policy environment is now a drag on vaccine development economics. You do not have to support all the lockdowns to understand the value of the COVID vaccine. And another pandemic is just a matter of time, so this is not a time for quibbling.
The amazing thing about Trumpism is how indifferent it is to horrible karma and looking like a collective idiot. Pulling the plug on the “World Health Organization” is a little like trying to shut down the US “Department of Education” (yes, that is a thing). Or to defund USAID or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (also things). Sure, you might have some culture war anti-woke messaging about it that might make sense to some people. And yes, you may even have a valid point here and there. But it just sounds so terrible that you may want to stop for a minute, and explain yourself better, and act like you care just a little about being seen to be a moron who is indifferent to humanity and decency.
Of course, they don’t. This is all part of the populist war on experts and knowledge and science. That is the tragicomic truth of it.
This could all change in 2028 ifs the Democrats win, and even a takeover of Congress in the November midterms would be helpful. Congress does have the formal authority to force US reengagement with the WHO — but any action it takes would collide with a predictable presidential veto. Overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers, which Democrats cannot reach on their own in any plausible scenario. So a real effort to bring the US back into the WHO would therefore depend on a significant bloc of Republicans deciding to cross party lines and acknowledge that global disease surveillance and outbreak coordination are not wokeries and not partisan luxuries but basic instruments of national self-protection. Since they are mostly cowardly lemmings, this is far from likely.
How history will judge the US under Trump is pretty clear. It will be quite incomprehensible, and will be viewed as a collective derangement. My question is whether history will record that Europe stepped up. In this, as in other matters. The EU’s GDP is about $23 trillion, and combined with that of the UK (which will come crawling back to the bloc eventually) it is almost the size of America’s.
The money is there, what’s needed for the WHO is chump change, and the rest is a question of priorities.
