Should America be Leaving the WHO?
Better to Influence from the Inside than be Isolated and Alone
In 2018, I was invited to meet House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology staffers to discuss my views on the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). At that time, there was a flurry of letters from Congressmen to a belligerent IARC leadership demanding meetings and explanations on some of the scientific activism within the WHO agency (their activist-led glyphosate and red meat monographs, the muzzling of US-based scientists involved in IARC…). The regulators were trying to decide whether the US should leave IARC or take a more active role in reforming it.
My advice then, based on my research and exposés around IARC’s glyphosate campaign, collusion with US tort lawyers and internal networks of activist scientists using IARC for their personal campaigns) was not to leave IARC but to try to reform it from the inside. Experience from the Reagan era was that you cannot reform or influence a UN agency from the outside.
I was glad the House Committee considered that advice and also plugged the transfers of special funds from the Lyon, France-based agency to the Collegium Ramazzini in Italy. In the chaos of the early years of the first Trump administration, the congressional staffers were surprised to learn that Linda Birnbaum was still heading the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and still channeling funds to her Ramazzini network.
Several years ago, as the Ramazzini-IARC-tort lawyer network were pushing a further phase of their La Jolla Playbook by pushing through a hazard-based report linking aspartame to cancer (and manufacturing a scientific link for a probable decade of lawsuits against Coca-Cola), the US government managed to intervene via an FDA letter to the WHO demanding the WHO agency for food additives, JECFA, provide the only risk assessment on the artificial sweetener. While the WHO has never been able to control the Ramazzini-led campaigns within IARC, the intervention managed to force the cancer agency to delay the publication of their monograph (and thus likely temper their findings) until after JECFA published their risk assessment (that concluded very low health risks from aspartame). This was enough to delay the tort lawyer strategy to extort billions from Coca-Cola (as they had managed with the Monsanto-Bayer settlement).
Even under the lifeless Biden administration, the Americans played a crucial role in interrupting the WHO’s plans to create a global pandemic agency where the WHO could control who would receive health-saving innovations, vaccines and how information would be shared. Future US administrations won’t be able to do this any more.
No one will dispute that the WHO presently is a cesspool of activist scientists leading their own political agenda (recall that one of the first decisions of the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was to name former dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador, since retracted). But abandoning any attempt to limit or reform the organization will not make things better.
Easy Decisions are not Necessarily Good Decisions
On Day One of Donald Trump’s second administration, with a stroke of a pen, America not only decided to leave IARC, but the entire WHO. It will take one year to complete the departure. Now many would assume that champagne corks would be popping here at The Firebreak but I wish there had been some thoughtful discussion on the ramifications of such an action.
While Trump made politics look easy via this executive order, America is now left outside of many global health debates (and looks to be even more isolated once RFK Jr lets MAHA rip through the US health system). Trump had tried to leave the WHO near the end of his first term of office but the Biden administration overturned that decision before it took effect. Avter COVID, I suspect many Americans think of the World Health Organization largely as a global pandemic service, but they are influential in the direction of global health research, public health strategies and health aid in developing countries.
Nothing much will change at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. Member states only fund less than 20% of the UN organization’s operational budget so the US contribution is relatively small (although the special programs will be greatly affected). More left-wing foundations will just step in and increase their donations (centered around their policy agenda and special interests). More billionaire philanthropists will be welcomed at UN meetings as “WHO ambassadors” as we see an evolution in international power structures (from governments to foundations). The donors in Davos are busy considering their opportunities as a further vacuum arises.
Without any US intervention, WHO policies will likely become even more unfettered. Riding on increased foundation support from the likes of Michael Bloomberg, activist scientists will step up their influence and campaigning in Geneva and Lyon as a means to act as a foil to US government policies.
WHO’s Strategy to Denormalize Industry
One situation that concerns me is the upcoming WHO high-level meeting on non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The Firebreak has reported extensively how activists from health NGOs (now working inside the WHO) are leading a campaign to have all of their member states cut any engagement, coordination or interaction with what they call “health-harming industries” in the same way that all member states have isolated the tobacco industry. According to the WHO’s 2024 publications on the “Commercial Determinants on Health” (CDoH), all industries seem to be classified as health-harming (including pharma, food and transportation industries).
The US will have no influence on the WHO’s agenda to denormalize relations with all of these industries and force member state signatories to ban contact or communication with industry lobbyists. The United States is now not only in no position to try to temper the radicals leading this strategy, US companies will have no voice at all in global health policy decisions. The WHO’s CDoH tobacconization strategy to be pushed through later this year (I assume during their General Assembly) now looks more like a done deal with little opposition.
What does this mean for industry?
Industry representatives already had very little contact with the WHO as their tobacconization strategy had already effectively been implemented internally. For example, during the recent mpox crisis, the WHO regional director for Africa admitted on Al Jazeera that she had no contact with Bavarian Nordic, the only producer of mpox vaccines. So how did industry manage this intolerable example of exclusionary bureaucratic politicking?
I spoke recently with a former British ambassador to the WHO. He not only conveyed government interests to the WHO, but also held regular meetings with industry groups to convey the concerns of British industry. Under the WHO’s proposed NCD tobacconization strategy, such meetings between governments and industry will not be allowed. Having left the WHO, there will be no American ambassador to the WHO. There will be no voice for the world’s main health researchers and innovators at a time when the WHO will be leading an exclusionary onslaught on industry.
The only thing worse than poor influence on a radically prejudiced UN agency is no influence at all, where activists are free to impose their destructive health dogma on the rest of the world.
Leaving the WHO may have been easy but it was not a good decision.