On 20 January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin the withdrawal of the United States of America (US) from the World Health Organization (WHO). At the core of the decision is US criticism of the WHO’s “mishandling” of the COVID-19 pandemic and other global health crises, including its alleged “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms”, its “inability to demonstrate independence” from the political influence of other Member States, especially China, and for the “unfairly onerous” payments demanded from the State, compared to other countries. Notably, for decades the US has been the largest donor to the WHO, supporting it through assessed and voluntary contributions. In the 2022-2023 biennium alone, it provided US$ 1.284 billion, accounting for approximately 20% of WHO’s total budget for the same period (see here).
WHO
The 77th World Health Assembly: Modest Amendments to the IHR-2005… More Expectations of the WHO’s ‘Pandemic Treaty’?
The Seventy-seventh World Health Assembly (‘WHA-77’) was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on 27 May – 1 June 2024. The theme of WHA-77 has been ‘All for Health, Health for All’, with two main hot topics on the agenda: (1) the revision of the International Health Regulations (IHR) from their 2005 version, based on more than…
Compliance and Accountability Mechanisms in the 2024 Revisions to the WHO International Health Regulations (2005)
Since the COVID-19 virus first emerged in China in late 2019 there have been many high-level reviews of how the world could better have tackled this devastating episode, including the report of the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR) report “Make it the Last Pandemic” co-chaired by Helen Clark and Ellen…
Editorial Correction
This post was published in error, instead of a new post by Prof. Bartolini. The post on the pandemic was published on EJIL: Talk! already in 2020, and can be found here. Many apologies to Prof. Bartolini and our readers. The new post will be published shortly.