Ooh, that’s a big one,” Donald Trump said Monday as he signed an executive order – one of dozens during his first hours as president – to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization.

The WHO is a United Nations agency that aims to expand universal health coverage, coordinates responses to health emergencies such as pandemics, and has a broad focus on healthy lives. It does not have the power to enforce health policy, but influences policy worldwide, especially in low-income countries.

More than half of Americans believe the U.S. benefits from its membership in the WHO. As of April 2024, 25% of U.S. adults say the country benefits a great deal from its membership, while about one third say it benefits a fair amount. Conversely, 38% say the U.S. does not benefit much or at all from WHO membership.

ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, has earmarked over 150 billion yuan ($20.64 billion) in capital expenditure for this year, much of which will be centred on artificial intelligence, two people briefed on the matter said.

As part of his blitz of executive orders, President Trump delivered on a promise to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization. The Trump White House accuses the WHO of mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and bias toward China.

The United States will leave the World Health Organization, President Donald Trump said on Monday, saying the global health agency had mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic and other international health crises.

For the second time in 2 years, an ongoing mpox outbreak has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by WHO.1 Following the global surge of clade IIb mpox in 2022, African countries face escalating challenges in managing expanding mixed outbreaks of clade I and II mpox.

TikTok, owned by ByteDance, is on the verge of being banned in the United States. The thing is, the government also went after other ByteDance apps, and there are quite a few of them operating in the U.

Analysis and insights for driving a rapid transition to net-zero while building resilience to physical climate impacts

President Trump’s decision to pull out of the international health agency could deprive the United States of crucial scientific data and lessen the country’s influence in setting a global health agenda.

The announcement by US President Donald Trump that the USA will withdraw from WHO1 will leave both a large financial gap and a political power vacuum in global health. The disruption endangers human lives worldwide because it is not only about leaving a bureaucratic apparatus—as WHO opponents like to portray the UN agency2—but it is also about an organisation that implements concrete health programmes with many partners at country level worldwide,

President Donald Trump said in his inaugural address that he had “no higher responsibility than to defend our country.” So what did Trump do on his first day in office? He made America weaker and more vulnerable.