The World Health Organisation and Donald Trump's administration still maintains contact despite the United States leaving the organization this year.
While the WHO is less dependent on U.S. financing, it has made it clear that it believes the world is less safe without its involvement. Insiders and admin officials told The Guardian columnist Devi Sridhar that, even though the U.S. had severed ties with the health body, it was still in touch with it.
Sridhar wrote, "We have China and Russia increasing their bilateral ties to low-income countries, tying together global health aid with their influence. And we have health threats such as the H5N1 variant of bird flu, antimicrobial resistance and continual disease outbreaks requiring rapid information-sharing and coordinated response.
"The U.S. government knows this. I am told that in all practical ways, Trump’s leadership team is still engaging with the agency privately, while lambasting it publicly."
Sridhar suggested the reason for opening private channels and yet blasting the organization publicly is to play up the MAGA voter base ahead of the midterm elections.
She wrote, "This plays to his MAGA base who need a foreign enemy to attack, while also ensuring the U.S. has the necessary global intel on health risks that the WHO holds. Yet again, Trump says one thing publicly while doing the opposite privately.
"In another 'emperor has no clothes' moment, the real story is that the U.S. government is more dependent on the WHO than vice versa." Professor Sridhar, a chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, also claimed the World Health Organisation had nearly buckled under MAGA pressure in the past.
"A senior WHO staff member told me that it had been pressed to align with the MAGA talking points on the links between vaccines and autism, and paracetamol in pregnancy and autism, as well as climate-change denialism," she wrote. "When the agency pushed back that this wasn’t scientifically accurate, it was reprimanded.
"Having studied the WHO (and co-written a book on it), it is bizarre to watch the U.S. government attacking the very agency it has been the architect and champion of for years. The entire UN system was premised on the idea that cooperation across countries could prevent collective catastrophes like the Second World War.
"U.S. leadership has been central to global campaigns against smallpox, polio, HIV/Aids and reducing child mortality. Financially, too, the U.S. has been the single largest contributor to the WHO, through assessed contributions and voluntary funding tied to specific programmes."