If Trump’s announcement is carried through, it would “probably be the most ruinous presidential decision in modern history,” said Lawrence Gostin, O’Neill professor of global health law at Georgetown University. The U.S. “wouldn’t have access to real-time data, wouldn’t be able to influence global decisions about health and safety, wouldn’t be contributing to global coordination on vaccines and treatment, so wouldn’t be part of any technical guidance to the world.”
As the novel coronavirus began its lethal spread throughout the United States—which now accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s more than 400,000 deaths from COVID-19—President Trump sought to redirect blame from his administration’s disastrous handling of the crisis to both the WHO and China, linking the two as complicit in covering up the virus’s dangers.
In a press conference on April 14, Trump announced that the U.S. would halt funding for the WHO to review its performance, alleging that “the WHO willingly took China’s assurances to face value…and defended the actions of the Chinese government, even praising China for its so-called transparency.” He added, “So much death has been caused by their mistakes.”
As COVID-19 deaths mounted in the U.S., Trump escalated his rhetoric against the WHO, sending a four-page letter on May 18, peppered with inaccuracies, that accused the organization of being in thrall to China. The letter complained that the WHO had caved to Chinese pressure to downplay the virus, failing to mention that Trump himself had spent February and March repeatedly claiming—even as recently as the end of April—that it would simply go away by itself.
The letter gave the WHO 30 days to “actually demonstrate independence from China” and threatened that, if it failed, the U.S. government would permanently freeze its funding and reconsider its membership.
The letter did not spell out what such a demonstration of independence would entail. But the inference—that the WHO could somehow force China to take certain actions, such as reporting its COVID-19 cases accurately—made little sense, said Professor Gostin: “It’s a catch-22. ‘I want you to do this, but you don’t have the power to do this.’”
Behind the scenes, a draft set of recommendations to reform the WHO, shared with G7 partners and obtained by Vanity Fair, enumerated a series of structural changes. They included proposals to insulate the WHO from political pressure, place the health emergency program under independent leadership, and change the way public health emergencies are declared by implementing a “traffic light system.” Under such a system, the WHO could issue a yellow-light warning urging member states to prepare for a developing crisis, before escalating, if necessary, to a red-light declaration of active emergency.
In late May, the National Security Council’s policy-coordinating committee met to hammer out the actual ask. What changes could the WHO actually make to meet the president’s demands? Ideas included inviting Taiwan, which has claimed its independence from China, to serve as an observer at the WHO, as well as having the WHO establish an independent review of its performance during the pandemic, said an official familiar with the deliberations.
By then, U.S. tensions with China had escalated. After China’s legislature made headlines for moving to pass a national security law restricting freedoms in Hong Kong, Trump decided he needed to signal toughness.
On May 29, almost halfway through the 30-day period given to the WHO, with negotiations well underway to address the Trump administration’s complaints, Trump stunned his own officials when he announced that the administration was cutting ties with the global health body.
The key U.S. agencies that work with the World Health Organization on critical public health programs were not consulted or asked for an impact analysis, which would have been typical in the run-up to such a big decision. As they raced to assemble lists of the programs that could be limited or terminated, many critical to the fight against coronavirus, the scale of the potential wreckage from Trump’s impromptu decision came into view.