The U.S. Formally Withdraws from the Reform-Resistant World Health Organization

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, January 23, 2026

 

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of State announced the completion of the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization.

 

The most severe public health crisis of our lifetime was the Covid-19 pandemic. In a circumstance like that, what would you want, or expect, an organization like the World Health Organization to do?

 

You would A) expect the organization to clearly communicate the best and most accurate information available from the earliest moment possible and then B) lead the effort to determine how the pandemic began, so that lessons could be learned about how to prevent something like it from ever happening again.

 

The World Health Organization is 0 for 2.

 

The WHO was unforgivably slow and misleading in the first month of the pandemic, nodding along to spectacularly implausible assessments from Chinese health authorities.

 

On January 8 and January 14, 2020, the WHO repeated the assessment that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.”  By that point, doctors in Wuhan had been catching the virus from their patients for five or six weeks. It wasn’t until January 19, 2020, that the World Health Organization updated its statement to leave some wiggle room, declaring, “not enough is known to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, the clinical features of the disease, the extent to which it has spread, or its source, which remains unknown.”

 

On January 22, 2020, on the WHO Emergency Committee, panel members express “divergent views on whether this event constitutes a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ or not. At that time, the advice was that the event did not constitute a PHEIC.”

 

WHO didn’t declare the outbreak an “emergency of international concern” until January 30. By that point, it was far too late; in the month of January 2020 alone, more than 1,300 flights from China arrived at 17 U.S. airports. The virus was loose, and off and running, all around the globe.

 

Throughout this vital time, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acted like China’s public relations consultant.

 

On February 20 at the Munich Security Conference, Tedros doubled down on his praise for China stating that “China has bought the world time.”

 

In contrast to his effusive praise for China, Tedros has been quick to criticize other countries for their responses to the outbreak. He called upon nations not to limit travel with China and warned against the “recrimination or politicization” of the outbreak. Domestic Chinese news coverage prominently features Tedros’ praise of Xi Jinping and criticism of foreign governments.

 

Things didn’t get better quickly. On March 28, 2020, WHO declared on social media, “Covid-19 is not airborne.” That was misleading; what exactly do you think a sneeze is? Do people sneeze directly into your mouth and nose? No, the droplets that contain SARS-CoV-2 float along on air currents.

 

As for the investigation of the origins of the pandemic that killed at least 7 million people (and in all likelihood, many millions more), in June 2025, the World Health Organization released its final report with a clear conclusion: ”We don’t know.”

 

An expert group charged by the World Health Organization to investigate how the Covid-19 pandemic started released its final report Friday, reaching an unsatisfying conclusion: Scientists still aren’t sure how the worst health emergency in a century began.

 

At a press briefing on Friday, Marietjie Venter, the group’s chair, said that most scientific data supports the hypothesis that the new coronavirus jumped to humans from animals.

 

That was also the conclusion drawn by the first WHO expert group that investigated the pandemic’s origins in 2021, when scientists concluded the virus likely spread from bats to humans, via another intermediary animal. At the time, WHO said a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”

 

Venter said that after more than three years of work, WHO’s expert group was unable to get the necessary data to evaluate whether or not Covid-19 was the result of a lab accident, despite repeated requests for hundreds of genetic sequences and more detailed biosecurity information that were made to the Chinese government.

 

“Therefore, this hypothesis could not be investigated or excluded,” she said. “It was deemed to be very speculative, based on political opinions and not backed up by science.” She said that the 27-member group did not reach a consensus; one member resigned earlier this week and three others asked for their names to be removed from the report.

 

“Until more scientific data becomes available, the origins of how SARS-CoV-2 entered human populations will remain inconclusive,” Venter said, referring to the scientific name for the Covid-19 virus.

 

This is pathetic. These are, allegedly, the best and brightest in the fields of medicine and investigating diseases. And after five years – and five years of intractable Chinese government stonewalling – WHO throws up its hands and concludes the cause of the worst and deadliest pandemic in a century will forever remain an unsolved mystery, worthy of the narration of a trenchcoat-wearing  Robert Stack. Meanwhile, some of us noticed and accumulated a small mountain of circumstantial evidence pointing to an explanation.

 

I would greatly prefer a reformed and highly effective World Health Organization, with the U.S. still participating, than for the U.S. to withdraw. But if the WHO isn’t willing to make any significant changes, and still is terrified of uttering a word that would irk the Chinese government, what’s the point of it? How much good can it do, when it considers getting along with Beijing as important a priority as protecting public health?