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US Withdrawal from World Health Organization Has Health Funds Scrambling for New Cash

The US is the WHO’s biggest donor, chipping in roughly 18% of the organization’s $2 billion to $3 billion annual budget.

Photo of the World Health Organization flag
Photo by United States Mission Geneva via CC BY 2.0

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On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. Completing the move will require congressional authorization and paying America’s dues to the international organization for this year.

But global health funding organizations are already looking to the private sector and the well-funded philanthropic foundations of the world’s richest to make up for a future shortfall in the UN health agency’s ability to distribute cash.

Unhealthy Choices

The US is the WHO’s biggest donor, chipping in roughly 18% of the organization’s $2 billion to $3 billion annual budget. If that funding ends, charities, non-profits, health organizations, academics, and developing countries that get funding from the WHO will almost certainly have to look to private companies and foundations to fill the gap.

Some started looking even before Trump’s decision, laying the groundwork for public sector pullbacks:

  • The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria — an international financing organization that funds disease prevention programs — told Reuters on Wednesday that it will ask private entities for nearly 50% more money, or $2 billion, in a new funding round. The group, which counts Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft among its corporate donors, raised $15.7 billion for three years in its last funding round, $1.3 billion from private donors.
  • Gavi, a public-private global health partnership focused on immunization in the world’s poorest regions, said last month that it is looking to raise $9 billion, and cited concern about shortfalls in support from government and global agencies.

Open the Gates: After the United States, the WHO’s second-biggest donor is not a country but the private foundation of two of the world’s richest people: the Gates Foundation. While the foundation remains strong after its founders, Bill and Melinda Gates, ended their marriage, it is already a donor to the Global Fund and Galvi. The foundation has previously expressed concern that it’s “not right” for the multibillion-dollar organization to play such a major role in global health funding, and that countries including and beyond the US should step up.