In one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump has moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization, joining only Soviet satellite states in ever attempting to do so, and cut the U.S. share of funding to the international health monitoring agency. It’s a bad prescription and puts at risk the well-being of people all over the globe, including Americans.

Sure, the WHO is too political and sure, it has been too deferential to China, as we saw during COVID, but while there might be good cause to quit other international bodies, like the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council, fighting deadly diseases in every country serves everyone’s interest, as viruses and bacteria don’t respect international borders.

It’s telling that Trump couched this withdrawal in monetary terms, but there’s a lot more than money at stake. The Geneva-based organization’s global monitoring, data-sharing, coordination and rapid response efforts are what often keeps emerging infectious diseases and other health hazards from spreading uncontrolled or even unnoticed, and the thing about these pathogens and threats to human health is that they don’t carry about what passport a person holds.

Beyond a moral responsibility to do what we can to tamp down on disease, particularly in places less equipped to do this work on their own, it’s a question of self-interest to nip these things in the bud.

None of this means that the WHO is a perfect organization or that it is above legitimate criticism. Many in the global public health sphere have themselves assailed the organization for excessive bureaucracy, favoritism, mismanagement and other ills, and it is reasonable for member states putting in big membership fees to raise these issues and demand reforms.

But that’s not what’s happening here; Trump is seeking a full withdrawal and a halt to all payments, which will put an appreciable dent in the agency’s budget. We might not feel the impact immediately, but we will feel it as the world as a whole gets less healthy and more chaotic.

Some people might wonder why this international apparatus matters so much when we have robust biomedical research and health research systems domestically; setting aside the interconnectedness of public health globally, Trump is taking aim at our national health agencies, too.

Several grant evaluation panels of the National Institutes of Health — responsible for originating the bulk of U.S. medical research — were abruptly canceled this week; these weren’t useless bureaucratic gab sessions but panels with names like the “Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria,” the sort of thing we don’t want much pause in funding research against.

While some temporary disruptions are par for the course during presidential switchovers, staffers have said the disruptions go further than usual, including rescinded job offers and a total ban on travel and all “communications” from staff. Once more, if these disruptions continue, we’ll only come to understand the dire consequences later on, as crucial research fails to materialize and public health authorities fall behind on monitoring threats.

The specter of a Department of Health and Human Services helmed by vaccine denier in chief RFK Jr. does not give us much hope for a system committed to safeguarding us. The consequences, unfortunately, will be measured in lives lost unless the administration changes course.

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