Expert: US leaving WHO would be 'gift' to China

President Donald Trump is doubling down on threats to withdraw U.S. funding and membership from the World Health Organization. One expert says the move would hurt efforts to control the global coronavirus pandemic and end up being a political win for China.

Historically the United States has been the biggest supporter of WHO, providing about $450 million each year. Lawrence Gostin, a Global Health Law Professor at Georgetown University, said leaving the organization during an unprecedented global health crisis is unforgivable and could mark a seismic political shift.

"There's nothing more worldly and a higher platform than being a global health leader in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. And that's what China's positioning itself to be," Gostin said. "It has no right to do that because it hasn't behaved as a global citizen. It never has. But the president of the United States has given China and its president a gift and it's a gift that is it is a particularly harmful one. Harmful to the world, but also harmful to the United States' national interests."

In a four-page letter to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, President Trump pointed out that China "continues to undermine International Health Regulations" by not providing accurate and timely data about the coronavirus and its own confirmed cases.

Gostin agrees that China has not been transparent but said Trump's letter is not a constructive tactic and even hypocritical because the US is also not following WHO recommendations.

"You actually do yourself a disservice by bringing up all of this hysteria and all of these threats. Nobody will listen," Gostin said. "You know, I was for a long time as a global health advocate asking China to be more transparent early on in the epidemic. One can do that in an evidence-based way to try to gain that cooperation."

At the end of the same letter, Trump threatened to fully cut U.S. funding to the WHO for good unless the agency commits to "substantive improvements" in the next 30 days, but Gostin believes that result is almost inconceivable.

"He doesn't have any power to do it. I mean, he needs Congress and there's no way that Congress is going to support withdrawing funds and withdrawing membership," Gostin said. "Frankly, I do not think he would win in the Senate, even the Senate. And he certainly wouldn't in the House."

During the opening day of the World Health Assembly, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China would offer $2 billion over two years to help with the COVID-19 response and economic fallout and vowed that any vaccine against the disease developed in his country would be made a "global public good."

European Union leaders tried to strike a middle ground between the two rivals during the conclusion of the assembly Tuesday, and WHO's agency's director-general simply tried to keep the focus on fighting the disease — not each other.