BY RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock
US withdrawal from the World Health Organization will make the US less safe, the world less safe, and diminish US leadership in global health.
Effectively preventing the spread of communicable diseases requires global cooperation in: disease surveillance; understanding the pathogen; developing diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics; determining best practice for addressing the disease; and, providing technical and financial support for countries that lack the means to address these diseases themselves.
US absence from WHO will make the control of communicable diseases more difficult for us and for other countries. During COVID, for example, WHO had an effective diagnostic test before the US did. However, US insistence on developing its own test, which ran into immediate difficulties, led to important delays in understanding and then addressing the new virus in the US.
The US has been a leader in financing global health research and practice. It has been associated both directly and by support for WHO, GAVI, the Global Fund, and the World Bank, among others, with saving countless lives through its support for programs in child health and the treatment of malaria, TB, and HIV. Its withdrawal from WHO will take away one arm of US support for its most successful development assistance programs.
The US will also be relinquishing its strategic role as a leader in global health by withdrawing from WHO. This is a role China would be happy to play.
“The health of anyone, anywhere, is the health of everyone, everywhere.” The desire of the US to ignore this essential fact risks harming all of us and harming people everywhere else, as well.
Richard Skolnik is the former Director for Health, Nutrition, and Population for South Asia at the World Bank. He was a Lecturer in Global Health at The George Washington University and Yale, where he still holds an appointment, and the Executive Director of a Harvard AIDS treatment program for three countries in Africa. Richard is also the Instructor for the Yale/Coursera course Essentials of Global Health and the author of Global Health 101, Fourth Edition.