Criticism of U.S. pullout from WHO from allies, China
— Top U.S. allies on Wednesday denounced the planned pullout of the United States from the World Health Organization, with the Italian health minister calling it “wrong” and a political ally of Germany’s chancellor warning that the withdrawal could make more room on the world stage for China.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, ratcheted up the Trump administration’s months of criticism of the U.N. health agency. The U.S., which is facing criticism for its own handling of the coronavirus, leads the world in confirmed cases and deaths, a situation that President Donald Trump has sought to blame on China.
In his comments, Pompeo repeated the WHO’s alleged failures in responding to the virus’s emergence in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December
and accused the agency of having “a long history of corruption and politicization” in dealing with other diseases.
The new broadsides appeared aimed at refocusing attention during a presidential election year on the shortcomings of WHO and China early in the pandemic that has since reached nearly 11.9 million confirmed cases and a death toll approaching 545,800.
“There is a real focus on the failures that took place around Wuhan and the World Health Organization’s fundamental inability to perform its basic core mission of preventing a global pandemic spread,” Pompeo said.
The United Nations and the U.S. State Department announced Tuesday that Washington had submitted formal notification that the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO within a year. The notice made good on President
Donald Trump’s vow in May to terminate U.S. participation in the WHO over its alleged missteps and kowtowing to China.
Trump’s presumptive opponent in November’s election, former Vice President Joe Biden, has vowed to rescind the decision on his first day in office, if he is elected.
Underscoring the unprecedented nature of the planned U.S. exit, the WHO doesn’t have language in its constitution about how a country could leave: The administration is mostly bound by U.S. legislation that requires a one-year notice and payment of any arrears in full before departure.
“We’ll get it right, but as the president has made very clear, we are not going to underwrite an organization that has historically been incompetent and not performed its fundamental function,” Pompeo said.
Questions were rife about how quickly the U.S. might start backing away from an organization it helped build over decades with both funding and expertise on global health issues as diverse as the fight against polio and smallpox to tobacco use, obesity and sugar consumption.
The Trump administration’s latest step to self-isolate — after pulling out of the Paris climate accord, the U.N’s human rights body and other international institutions — was bound to affect the WHO through the loss of both U.S. money and medical know-how, experts said.
Critics insist the pullout also will have a negative impact on the U.S. from losing both a voice and an ear in some of the world’s top conversations on healthcare.
WHO officials have declined to comment on the withdrawal, saying they have not directly received formal U.S. notification. They previously suggested that the loss of American expertise, such as from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, would hurt as much if not more than the loss of funds from the agency’s top contributor.
The U.S. provides WHO with more than $450 million per year and currently owes some $200 million in current and past dues.
Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza called Trump’s pullout decision “serious and wrong.”
“The health crisis has shown that we need a reformed and stronger WHO, not a weaker one,” he said. Italy was the onetime epicenter of the pandemic in the West and relied heavily on WHO’s guidance as it struggled to contain the virus and treat COVID-19 patients.
His German counterpart, Jens Spahn, decried a “setback for international cooperation” on Twitter, writing that more global cooperation, not less, is needed to fight pandemics.
“European states will initiate #WHO reforms,” Spahn tweeted.
Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya said the WHO needs “more autonomy” and the world needs more cooperation to prepare for future pandemics.
“What we need today is more multilateralism and less national sovereignty as a guarantee for protecting our citizens, even if that means that we go against what others have said in other parts of the world,” González Laya told reporters. “Let’s not get carried away by siren songs.”
Juergen Hardt, a foreign policy spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition, said that the U.S. withdrawal damages American and Western strategic interests just as China, a key WHO member state, has been taking a greater role in international institutions.