America Should Rejoin the World Health Organization

No, I haven’t lost my mind.

I, like everyone else, remember how the World Health Organization (WHO) disgraced itself during the pandemic, hubristically assuming the role of global medical guru to guide the unenlightened masses to safety. I recall how it advised the world’s governments to adopt draconian lockdowns and mandates. How it encouraged people to regulate every social interaction by the meter, so that no speck of hazardous human connection could squeeze through the cracks. I remember the recommendations of masks, intrusive testing regimes, and quarantines well after they had all outlived their usefulness.

The WHO’s loss of prestige during the pandemic was well deserved. But we should remember that its pandemic-era recommendations were just that: recommendations. They never held any lawful authority in the United States, as the WHO lacks direct regulatory power. The policies enacted in this country to “slow the spread” and whatever else were chosen by our own governments — local, state, and federal — not imposed by any international organization.

Still, the WHO showed that its guidance could not be trusted during the pandemic, which is partly why President Trump withdrew the United States from the organization last year. Why would we continue to subsidize it through our membership dues? What use does the WHO offer us?

Apparently, pandemic-era press conferences aside, the WHO offered us quite a lot in the realm of public health. The organization’s primary job is not to issue guidance to governments but to do the mundane, bureaucratic work of tracking and responding to deadly diseases around the world, which we might want to know something about before they show up in America.

The Trump administration has concluded that this work is indispensable to federal public health functions. As the Washington Post reported last week:

After pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Trump administration is proposing spending $2 billion a year to replicate the global disease surveillance and outbreak functions the United States once helped build and accessed at a fraction of the cost, according to three administration officials briefed on the proposal.

The effort to build a U.S.-run alternative would re-create systems such as laboratories, data-sharing networks and rapid-response systems the U.S. abandoned when it announced its withdrawal from the WHO last year and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations.

Alright, but how much more than WHO membership could this American effort really cost?

While President Donald Trump accused the WHO of demanding “unfairly onerous payments,” the alternative his administration is considering carries a price tag about three times what the U.S. contributed annually to the U.N. health agency.

Yes, although the United States was the largest contributor to the WHO’s budget, it paid just $680 million in assessed dues and voluntary payments.

But at least we’ll be constructing much better public health systems than the WHO has, to compensate for that added cost, right?

“Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who served as a senior covid-19 adviser during the Biden administration. “We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere the influence we had.”

Darn. So we are going to build worse public health systems — which, it turns out, are indispensable — for three times the cost of accessing the superior ones that already exist.

(By the way, the WHO also provides its member countries with data on which influenza strains their vaccines should target each year. This might also be somewhat useful.)

Here’s what I think: Given that U.S. officials can ignore every syllable of WHO guidance it releases from now until forever, it makes no sense to forgo the tangible benefits of membership. I wish there were a better alternative that could perform all the global public health functions of the WHO, but there is not.

Withdrawing from the organization out of spite does us no good, and rejoining the organization would save Americans $1.32 billion per year. The populist, feel-good position on this issue isn’t worth the price tag.