US still wants global health cooperation, but not through WHO

There’s no official U.S. delegation at this year’s 78th World Health Assembly, but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. from throwing down punches on the World Health Organization at its own gathering. In a video address on Tuesday shown at the WHA, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. invited health ministers to join the United States in a “new era of cooperation.” “We don’t have to suffer the limits of a moribund WHO. Let’s create new institutions or revisit existing institutions that are lean, efficient, transparent, and accountable,” Kennedy said. He recalled the U.S. decision to withdraw from the agency, noting the WHO “has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics,” and how it “capitulated to political pressure from China” during the COVID-19 global emergency. He argued WHO “has not even come to terms with its failures during COVID, let alone made significant reforms.” He also criticized the agency’s efforts toward the realization of a pandemic agreement — which was adopted Tuesday morning — and reiterated that the U.S. will not participate in it. He acknowledged that WHO has done some important work, such as in the eradication of smallpox, but alleged that its priorities “have increasingly reflected the biases and interests of corporate medicine” and that it has “allowed political agendas like pushing harmful gender ideology to hijack its core mission.” “Global cooperation on health is still critically important to President Trump and myself, but it isn’t working very well under the WHO,” he said. At WHO’s executive board meeting in February, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said WHO immediately asked China for information as soon as it picked up signals of a circulating viral pneumonia in Wuhan, and has implemented wide-ranging reforms. In his speech to the assembly on Tuesday morning following the adoption of the pandemic agreement, Tedros also identified what WHO has done in response to the “painful lessons” from COVID-19, including support for the creation of the Pandemic Fund to support countries’ capacities to prevent, prepare, and respond to future pandemics, and the establishment of a pandemic intelligence hub in Berlin to help detect signals of disease outbreaks earlier and trigger a more rapid response. Only China responded to Kennedy’s speech, saying: “The United States should stop politicizing and instrumentalizing the pandemic” and stop “shifting blame onto other countries.”