Who's WHO?
A brief history of the World Health Organization and the brainworms who want it gone
A short history of the World Health Organization
In 1945 at the founding of the United Nations they discussed setting up a global health organization. In 1946 a constitution for the World Health Organization was created and that constitution went into effect on April 7, 1948. The current iteration of that constitution along with other core documents can be found on the WHO website here.
The mission of the WHO is to promote the health and wellbeing of people across the globe by establishing channels for sharing scientific data between nations. Its second tenet really sets out its purpose clearly, “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.” It has been key in the eradication or near eradication of diseases like smallpox and polio. The WHO led the fight against Ebola outbreaks in West Africa between 2014-2016. It drove rapid innovation of vaccines during the COVID pandemic. They are leading the fight against tuberculosis, the number one leading cause of death by disease globally to this day.
Just to be clear, the WHO is not a perfect organization. No one denies this. No organization is. The WHO has been in the process of reveiwing all of its protocols and plans since the COVID pandemic to be better prepared for global health issues.
Why Trump claims he wants to leave the WHO
On January 20, 2025, Donalt Trump issued an executive order titled Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. Why would Trump want to withdraw from an organization with such a noble purpose? One of the stated reasons is very on brand for the man who never pays his bills, he disagrees with the assessed dues, claiming the US dues are out of proportion with other countries. Luckily, this is a fact we can easily check as the WHO publishes this data.
He claims “China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.” Dues are assessed based on GDP of member states, not population. Then there are voluntary contributions on top of those. The strongest economy on Earth should donate the most money to scientific research to keep the world healthy. As we see in the below chart from by Reuters based on numbers from WHO the US assessed dues make up 22% of the current WHO budget. China makes up a little over 15%. No matter how you slice it, that’s not a 90% difference in assessed contributions. In other words, as usual, Trump is lying and hoping no one is smart enough to check the facts.
His other claim attempts to blame the deaths of the COVID-19 pandemic on failures at the WHO and repeats his claims of outside influence and corruption at the WHO. He peddles unfounded claims and conspiracy theories ranging from the WHO being incompotent to the WHO being run by a dark cabal that wants to steal your freedom. Trump takes no responsiblity for his own failures durning the first months of the pandemic. He spread lies, conspiracies, and idiotic remedies from horse dewormer to injecting disinfectant. He responded to the pandemic the way any functionally illiterate deranged malignant narcissist would. He did everything wrong.
Why Trump really wants to leave the WHO
There are a few reasons our liar-in-chief might want to leave the WHO.
Let’s be honest. The primary reason is they refused to bend the knee and accept his insane theories as valid. Trump’s narcicism will not allow him to accept criticism no matter how valid.
Second, Trump has surrounded himself with yes men, idiots, and conspiracy theorists. We’ll get into that clown show in the next section.
Finally, one need only look at the first page of the WHO Constitution to understand why Trump’s billionaire donors want out of the WHO. Phrases like “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being…” don’t sit well with an industry built on for-profit medicine. Calling health a human right goes against everything billionaires stand for. Someone should remind them how that goes for the rich when the population begins to starve or die of preventable illness. See also France in the late 18th century and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The Clown Show
First clown out of the car is Robert Kennedy, Jr., who he’s tapped to run Health and Human Services. For those not familiar with RFK Jr., let’s go down the highlight reel of reasons he is one of the worst possible picks for this job.
RFK Jr. said under oath in a 2012 deposition “A worm… got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Parasitic brain worms aren’t a common complaint in developed countries, but considering the next bullet point I bet we can figure out where he got it.
RFK Jr. has on multiple occasions told reporters he has been “picking up roadkill my whole life. I have a freezer full of it.” If you are wondering where the brain worm came from, I think this gives us a clue. He also tells the story of picking up a bear carcass by the side of the road in upstate New York with the intention of skinning it and eating the meat. He then, instead, realized he’d have to make a flight and thought better of leaving a rotting bear carcass in his car at the airport. Instead he decided to put the bear carcass in Central Park as a prank. NPR has a good write up on that absolutely insane story. Sounds like the actions of a man with brain worms…
RFK Jr. continues to spread the debunked study claiming vaccines cause autism. They do not. The NIH has published a paper on the topic citing 15 different independent studies which back their conclusions. The good folks over at immunize.org published another paper citing 27 more independent studies. Vaccines go through rigorous testing. For example, the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 were not new or experimental. Work on mRNA vaccines started in the 1960s. They were tested on mice in the 1990s as a flu vaccine. Human trials were started in 2013. mRNA was used to fight the spread of Ebola in West Africa. Because of its flexibility as a delivery mechanism, mRNA vaccines were the perfect vehicle for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine since SARS-CoV-2 is a rapidly evolving vector and the vaccine must keep up.
If Captain Brain Worm isn’t bad enough for you, let me introduce you to “America’s Doctor” Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. For years Dr. Oz was the go to TV doctor appearing on morning shows and news programs while hosting his own show in the process. His credibility came into question when people learned that many of the cures he sold or advocated were nothing short of snake oil, complete scams. So the man tapped to run the department in charge of the health of America’s most vulnerable citizens is a scam artist. He also has some beliefs which specifically contradict his role in this adminstration. Let’s look at his greatest hits, shall we?
In 2012 Dr. Oz claimed that green coffee extract was a magic weight loss cure. Spoiler: It is not. Thankfully it is also no more dangerous than coffee according to most sources so it just wasted people’s money. One of the companies paid the FTC a $3.5 million dollar settlement over using a study they knew was flawed to make baseless weight-loss claims.
In 2013 he went back to the weight-loss well to claim that raspberry ketones were the “number 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat.” The same year he touted Garcinia cambogia to do the same. Again, both claims were completely baseless.
In one 2011 episode of his show he claimed that apple juice contained unsafe levels of arsenic, citing tests from a New Jersey lab and inciting a scare. First, the FDA has tested apple juice for arsenic for decades and has found that most apple juice contains no detectable levels of any kind of arsenic. Second, Oz failed to mention wheter the arsenic discovered was organic or inorganic. That matters because organic arsenic is considered relatively non-toxic at most levels found in nature. Inorganic arsenic is the nasty form we think of when we think of arsenic poisoning.
Dr. Oz believes Americans don’t have a right to health. He fully supports a for-profit healthcare system where only Americans who can afford top-tier insurance deserve quality care. He said as much in a 2013 speech to Republican governors.
Dr. Oz opposes the Affordable Care Act, calling it wrong. As head of CMS, Oz would be responsible for implementing the ACA’s consumer protections.
Dr. Oz has specifically called to gut Medicare and push seniors onto expensive privatized plans.
Dr. Oz is anti-abortion. He plays it off as a states’ rights issue, but as with any issue where states are left in charge of basic human rights, many fall on the side of oppression. Dr. Oz will not work to protect the basic human right of bodily autonomy.
The Aftermath
Public health experts worldwide agree the US withdrawl from the WHO is a giant mistake with potentially globally catastrophic results. Leaving the WHO puts the lives of countless people worldwide at risk.
The US could miss early warning size of disease and emerging pandemic threats.
Certain threats being monitored today may spread out of hand without global cooperation. Threats such as bird flu, monkey pox, and new COVID variants could run out of control without globally coordinated efforts to contain them.
New vaccines currently in development to fight emerging threats will be slowed or stopped due to lack of funding and cooperation.
Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it best. “The WHO is not a perfect institution, but it plays an irreplacable role in global outbreak response and, by withdrawing this action, reduces the ability of the United States to positively influence that response to outbreak. It makes Americans less safe.”