Soon after taking office for his second term, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday (January 20) directing the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), saying the agency had mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic and other international health crises.

Trump said the WHO failed to act independently of "undue political influence from WHO member states" and also asked the United States to "unfairly pay huge fees" that were disproportionate to the amounts provided by other larger countries such as China.

"The World Health Organization ripped us off, and everyone ripped off the United States. That won't happen again," Trump said as he signed an executive order to withdraw from the organization at the White House just hours after taking office.

The WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move means the United States will withdraw from the UN health agency within 12 months and stop all financial contributions to its work. The United States is the largest financial contributor to the WHO, contributing about 18% of its total funding. The WHO's most recent two-year budget (2024-2025) is $6.8 billion.

The U.S. withdrawal from the WHO is expected to trigger a major restructuring of the agency and could further disrupt global health programs. Several experts said the U.S. withdrawal could hit the entire WHO program hard, especially those that address the world's biggest infectious killers, tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS, and other health emergencies.

Trump's order said that during the process of withdrawing from the WHO, the U.S. government will stop negotiations on the WHO's Pandemic Convention; U.S. government personnel working with the WHO will be recalled and reassigned, and the government will look for partners to take over necessary WHO activities.

The order said that his government will review, revoke and replace the previous Biden administration's 2024 U.S. Global Health Security Strategy as soon as possible. The strategy aims to prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease threats.

The second largest donor to the WHO is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, although most of that money goes to polio eradication and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, followed by the European Commission and the World Bank. The second largest national donor is Germany, which contributes about 3% of WHO funding.

Second Seek to Withdraw

This is the second time Trump has sought to cut ties with the WHO.

During his first term as US President in 2020, he issued a notice of intent to withdraw from the WHO, accusing the WHO of being overly influenced by China in the early stages of the pandemic and assisting China in "misleading the world" about the origin of the new coronavirus.

The WHO strongly denied the accusation and said it would continue to urge Beijing to share data to determine whether the new coronavirus originated from human contact with infected animals or from research on similar viruses in domestic laboratories.

Trump also suspended US contributions to the WHO, resulting in the agency's budget being reduced by nearly $200 million in the 2020-2021 period compared with the previous two years, when the WHO was responding to the world's worst health emergency in a century.

Under U.S. law, withdrawal from the WHO requires one year’s notice and payment of all outstanding fees.

During Trump’s last administration, the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO was not completed before Joe Biden won the U.S. presidential election and stopped the withdrawal on his first day in office on January 20, 2021.

Trump’s announcement of his withdrawal from the WHO comes amid growing concerns that the current outbreak of avian influenza (H5N1), which has infected dozens of people in the United States and killed one, could trigger a global pandemic.

Meanwhile, WHO member states have been negotiating the world’s first International Convention on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response since late 2021. Now, the negotiations will take place without the U.S.

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