Trump pulls US from World Health pandemic reforms

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s administration said on Friday that the United States was rejecting changes agreed last year at the World Health Organization (WHO) on its pandemic response, saying they violated the country’s sovereignty.

On returning to office on January 20, Trump immediately began his nation’s withdrawal from the UN body, but the State Department said the language from last year would still have bound the United States.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr, a long-time critic of vaccines, said the changes ‘risk unwarranted interference with our national sovereign right to make health policy.’

‘We will put Americans first in all our actions and we will not tolerate international policies that infringe on Americans’ speech, privacy or personal liberties,’ they said in a joint statement.

Rubio and Kennedy disassociated the United States from a series of amendments to the International Health Regulations — the legal framework for combating diseases — agreed last year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.

‘We regret the US decision to reject the amendments,’ WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement posted on X.

He stressed the amendments are clear about member states’ sovereignty’, adding that the WHO cannot mandate lockdowns or similar measures.

The changes included a stated ‘commitment to solidarity and equity’, under which a new group would study the needs of developing countries in future emergencies.

Countries have until Saturday to register reservations about the amendments. Conservative activists and vaccine sceptics in Britain and Australia, both of which have left-leaning governments, have waged public campaigns against the changes.

The amendments arose after the Assembly failed in its more ambitious aim of sealing a new global agreement on pandemics.

Most of the world finally secured a treaty this May, but the United States did not participate because it was in the process of withdrawing from the WHO.

Under President Joe Biden, the United States took part in the May–June 2024 negotiations but said it could not support consensus because it demanded protections for US intellectual property rights on vaccine development.

Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, had welcomed the amendments as progress.

In rejecting the amendments, Rubio and Kennedy said the changes ‘fail to adequately address the WHO’s susceptibility to political influence and censorship — most notably from China — during outbreaks’.

Ghebreyesus said the body is ‘impartial and works with all countries to improve people’s health’.

By RSS/AFP