Trump pulls US from pandemic response reforms over supposed risk to "national sovereignty"
Washington DC - President Donald Trump's administration said Friday the US was rejecting changes agreed last year for the World Health Organization on its pandemic response, claiming they violated US sovereignty.
Trump on returning to office on January 20 immediately began the withdrawal of the US from the UN body, but the State Department said the language last year would still have been binding on the US.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who is a longtime critic of vaccines, said that the changes "risk unwarranted interference with our national sovereign right to make health policy."
"We will put Americans first in all our actions, and we will not tolerate international policies that infringe on Americans' speech, privacy, or personal liberties," they said in a joint statement.
Rubio and Kennedy disassociated the US from a series of amendments to the International Health Regulations, which provide a legal framework for combatting diseases, agreed last year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.
The amendments included a stated "commitment to solidarity and equity," in which a new group would study the needs of developing countries in future emergencies.
The amendments came about after the Assembly failed at a more ambitious goal of sealing a new global agreement on pandemics.
The potential treaty had drawn fierce criticism from mostly conservative voices in the US, Britain, and other countries suspicious of global efforts on disease and of vaccines.
Trump administration rejects WHO's pandemic amendments
The US, then under President Joe Biden, took part in negotiations but said it did not reach consensus as it demanded protections for US intellectual property rights on vaccine development.
But Rubio's predecessor, Antony Blinken, welcomed the amendments as progress when he convened a meeting on global health in September with counterparts mostly from other developed countries but also India.
In their rejection of the amendments, Rubio and Kennedy also said that the changes "fail to adequately address the WHO's susceptibility to the political influence and censorship – most notably from China – during outbreaks."
Cover photo: Andrew CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP