The potential impacts of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization

Lawrence Gostin:

Yes, actually, I think it is wrong, but it’s not totally wrong.

Let me explain. The WHO has a budget of roughly one-quarter of the U.S. CDC. So, for a global institution, it’s chronically underfunded. It doesn’t have the resilience and funding that it needs to put out fires all over the world. So the United States shouldn’t pay less, but other countries should pay more.

China should, India, the Gulf states, many other middle-income countries. So I think that Trump would do a much greater service to the United States and the world if he stayed in and he negotiated a deal. Yes, let’s make WHO more resilient. Let’s fund it better. Let’s make it more powerful and let’s make it more accountable with financial oversight.

But leaving it would gravely damage United States’ national interests and world health writ large. It’s not really like the border, where you can kind of seal off the Mexican border so that you can stop immigrants. Germs don’t know borders. And a United States without WHO is a United States alone and isolated and more fragile and vulnerable.