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Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States at the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC, on Monday, January 20, 2025. Eight hours after he entered the Oval Office, one of the first executive orders he issued was withdrawing the USA from the World Health Organization.
Trump defended the withdrawal by citing a series of reasons, including WHO’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises” and “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms.” He claimed that the organization demands “unfairly onerous payments” from the USA while China pays significantly less.
Trump also cited WHO’s “inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence” of its “member states.”
Since the news circulated online, netizens have had diverse reactions. For instance, X user Ary, aka @Winterteacup23, commented on Pop Base’s post about it and said:
“Oh, so we’re going fully fascist in the first 5 hours huh,” a user wrote.
Many people joined the conversation and shared similar reactions on the platform.
“Why is the U.S. government determined to make sure that Americans have the worst health care on the planet?” a person asked.
“In just 7 hours, he has already been the worst American president of all time omg,” one person wrote.
“Good luck. I hope prayers help. Because they are going need them to be. He also stopped cheaper priced medications,” wrote another.
Others continued to weigh in.
“The same man who told everyone to inject bleach into their skin during Covid,” a netizen wrote.
“We’re all dying within the next 4 years,” another netizen wrote.
“Wow. The US plays a crucial role in WHO. The CDC there and WHO work together and play a role in helping the world be more educated and aware of the latest health trends. Now, Trump throw it all away. He threatened to do it before, and here he is,” a user wrote.
“But it’s okay because he unbanned TikTok guys,” an individual mocked.
The step aligns with Trump’s campaign promise to cut ties with global institutions.
More about Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from WHO
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the USA from the WHO was not sudden. In 2020, he condemned the organization over its measures to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and threatened to withhold funding. In July of that year, the then-45th President took official steps to pull out.
However, he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, who, on his first day in office on January 20, 2021, overturned the executive order and restored funding.
After Trump’s withdrawal from the agency, public health experts told the New York Times that the move would “undermine the nation’s standing as a global health leader and make it harder to fight the next pandemic.”
Additionally, the recent step-back would mean that the CDC would no longer have access to global data that the WHO formulates. For instance, in 2020, the WHO provided the USA and other nations with the genetic sequence of COVID-19 after China shared it with the agency.
Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health law expert and the faculty director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told the New York Times that the move would be “a grievous wound” to public health and an “even deeper wound to American national interests and national security.”
In a separate statement to USA Today, Gostin explained that Trump’s executive order wasn’t enough to withdraw the country from WHO. First, Congress must adopt a joint resolution informing the agency about the decision, provide an annual notice, and pay off all its monetary obligations for the current fiscal year.
“This is going to be a grave strategic error that will make America less healthy and less safe. The withdrawal itself is going to isolate the United States. It’ll isolate us diplomatically, and it’ll isolate us in pandemic response… Our public health agencies would be flying blind…In the next pandemic, we might find ourselves at the back of the line, on the outside looking in,” he told USA Today.
Notably, Mr. Lawrence negotiated the “pandemic treaty,” which was recently formed to solidify “pandemic preparedness” and “set legally binding policies for member countries on surveillance of pathogens, rapid sharing of outbreak data, and building up local manufacturing and supply chains for vaccines and treatments,” among other things.
However, conservative lawmakers saw the treaty as a threat to American sovereignty.
The United States has been the largest funder of the WHO, which has an annual budget of $6.8 billion. In 2023, the USA paid one-fifth of the total amount. The nation has been part of the WHO since its foundation, and its exit would make it the only world power not a member of its 194-country agency.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus previously told USA TODAY that the agency will do “everything to cooperate with the incoming Trump administration to continue to strengthen global health security.”
Spokesperson Tarik Jašarević cited Ghebreyesus via an email and added that the relationship between the USA and WHO had "protected and saved millions of lives in America and around the world."
