America and the WHO: An Essential Partnership

On January 20, President Donald Trump announced that he is initiating a process by which the U.S. will withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) by the end of this year. The intervening months will see this question extensively discussed and debated in Washington and beyond, but it’s important to recall at the outset that the WHO is not just essential for the world—it’s essential for America.

Since its founding in 1948, the WHO has been responsible for coordinating between member state health departments and UN agencies to tackle our world’s biggest health threats. In that time, it has played a pivotal role in massive achievements like the eradication of smallpox and the near-eradication of polio, and it has stopped countless local disease outbreaks before they could become global pandemics.

In 1967, the WHO led a global effort to eradicate smallpox through universal vaccination. By 1980, the disease was eradicated, with no new naturally occurring cases anywhere on earth since. In just 13 years, a longstanding scourge that had claimed some 300 million lives in the 20^th century alone was ended, forever.

The WHO has also spearheaded subsequent disease prevention and eradication efforts through the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), which has saved more than 154 million lives since its inception in 1979. That’s one life saved every ten seconds thanks to the efforts of international agencies and national governments, private sector innovation, and the leadership and coordination of the WHO.

While each of the 13 vaccines included in the EPI have saved lives and spared children from debilitating illnesses, two in particular stand out. Thanks to global immunization efforts led by WHO, wild poliovirus has gone from paralyzing a thousand children every day to infecting less than 100 people in 2024. And measles, one of the most infectious diseases to affect humans, has been eliminated from the Americas and dramatically reduced worldwide over the same period.

But the WHO’s role extends beyond the long, steady work of eradicating age-old diseases. Every year, the WHO plays a critical role in keeping Americans safe and healthy, whether through its role in the annual flu vaccine updates or its coordination of disease surveillance and response.

Every year, influenza ripples through the global population, mutating and adapting as it does. But every year, Americans have easy access to safe, effective flu vaccines that have been specifically updated to protect against these new, mutated strains of the virus, thanks in large part to the WHO.

National public health agencies all over the world collect flu virus samples and send them to the WHO, whose technical teams are responsible for analyzing the samples and making recommendations about the annual changes to the composition of the flu vaccine. Without this coordination and rapid analysis, private sector manufacturers would not have the lead time required to rollout updated vaccines at scale for each upcoming flu season. And while flu vaccines may seem easy to take for granted, they prevent some seven million cases and seven thousand deaths in the U.S. alone every year, as well as averting significant costs to the American and global economies.

The WHO is also responsible for coordinating the response to emerging disease threats all over the world, from Ebola to mpox to Marburg. While no response is perfect and novel pathogens like COVID-19 may still break through, WHO’s unique ability to coordinate a response between national, international, and private sector actors has contained countless outbreaks before they could spread—all on a smaller budget than many U.S. state departments of health. In a globalized world where a disease can travel from a remote village to a major American city in just 36 hours, these responses are more critical than ever to keeping Americans safe.

In addition to protecting American and global health, the WHO plays an important role in continuing to advance medical innovations—many of which come from the United States—and spread them around the world.

The U.S. remains the world leader in medical research and innovation—and it’s not even close. In fact, more than one-third of all vaccines purchased worldwide come from American manufacturers.

But one reason these innovations are able to improve health on a global scale is that we have the WHO playing the role of international regulator. Through their “pre-qualification” system—which provides an accelerated pathway for approval of vaccines, medications, and other innovations in urgent contexts—the WHO facilitates the rapid deployment of these tools to the places that need them most.

In addition to helping people all over the world combat deadly diseases, procurement contracts for American medical innovations help spur jobs and investment here at home. In 2023, the WHO purchased $51 million of American goods and services, creating economic returns in states from Alabama to Pennsylvania and Florida to Tennessee.

Ultimately, the value of the World Health Organization rests on a single, irrefutable fact: in today’s interconnected world, diseases are not bound by borders, and a health crisis anywhere is a threat to us all.

The decades-long partnership between the U.S. and the WHO has an enviable record of achievement: averting deaths, alleviating suffering, and making the world a healthier, more secure, and more prosperous place. It’s a record, and a partnership, we can be proud of. And it’s something we can build on.