World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently complained that WHO is being forced to make some drastic cuts after President Donald Trump pulled U.S. taxpayer dollars out of the globalist organization. Ghebreyesus told the executive board of the organization that 2025 was “undeniably one of the most difficult years in our organization’s history,” during the agency’s yearly board meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
“Significant cuts to our funding left us with no choice but to reduce the size of our workforce,” he told the board. The U.S. originally reserved the right to pull out of the WHO in 1948, with the only condition being a year’s notice and meeting the financial obligation it already agreed to for that fiscal year. President Trump confirmed the U.S. would be leaving the agency on the first day of his second term, slamming the group for being “China-centric” during the height of the global coronavirus pandemic.
The Department of Health and Human Services stated that it decided to leave the WHO over its mishandling of the pandemic and an inability to make needed and necessary changes and the political influence of member states. The government has withheld dues from 2024 and 2025, owing a total of $260 million. This hits the WHO extremely hard as the U.S. has been the top individual donor to the organization, having contributed $400 million to it in 2020.
According to Breitbart News, as the notice countdown expired, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., stated that the WHO had “tarnished and trashed everything that America has done for it”, with “the insults to America” stretching on to the very end. During the executive board meeting, Israel had stern words for the organization saying that it had become politicized and that the withdrawal of the United States should ultimately lead to a rethink of its purpose and whether or not it should continue forward.
“In response to funding cuts, WHO is supporting many countries to sustain essential health services, and to transition away from aid dependency towards self-reliance,” Ghebreyesus said during the meeting. A report from the United Nations revealed that there are still 4.6 billion people that do not have ready access to essential health services, while 2.1 billion have found themselves facing financial hardships due to the cost of care.
A number of individual states in America have decided to join with the WHO, despite President Trump pulling the plug on overall funding, including the Illinois Department of Public Health. The IDPH has joined the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), making it the second state in the country to do so. California was the first. The Golden State joined in January. Officials in Illinois say the decision was made to keep the state informed on up-to-date global health information, The New Republic reported.
“We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, went on to say during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”
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Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video