RFK torches WHO at World Health Assembly

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. scathingly rebuked the World Health Organization (WHO) in a televised message at the organization’s annual World Health Assembly in Geneva.

A Chinese tool

Kennedy began by noting that President Donald Trump has ordered a US withdrawal from the WHO—costing the organization its largest donor—and offered “some background to that decision.”

“Like many legacy institutions, the WHO has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics,” he said. “While the United States has provided the lion’s share of the organization’s funding historically, other countries such as China have exerted undue influence over its operations in ways that serve their own interests and not particularly the interests of the global public.”

“This all became obvious during the COVID pandemic, when the WHO, under pressure from China, suppressed reports at critical junctures of human-to-human transmission and then worked with China to promote the fiction that COVID originated from bats or pangolins rather than from ... Chinese government-sponsored research at a biolab in Wuhan.”

Accountable to political and corporate interests

“Not only has the WHO capitulated to political pressure from China, it’s also failed to maintain an organization characterized by transparency and fair governance by and for its Member States,” Kennedy said. “The WHO often acts like it has forgotten that its members must remain accountable to their own citizens and not to transnational or corporate interests.”

Kennedy took a moment to praise WHO’s staff as conscientious people and the organization itself for the eradication of smallpox, then moved on to accusing it of now promoting corporate and political interests.

“Too often, it has allowed political agendas like pushing harmful gender ideology to hijack its core mission. And too often, it has become a tool of politics and turned its back on promoting health and health security.”

US withdrawal is ‘a wake-up call’

The secretary lambasted the WHO for refusing to acknowledge its failures during the COVID-19 pandemic and criticized it for “doubling down” on those failures with the Pandemic Agreement, unanimously approved by member states during the Assembly on Tuesday. 

“Well, we’re not going to participate in that,” Kennedy said, then pivoting to an explanation on how the US is reforming its public health agencies to focus on eradicating America’s chronic disease epidemic rather than obeying corporate interests. He mentioned how the HHS has begun eliminating food dyes, seeks to reduce the consumption of junk food, promotes healthier lifestyle choices, and is investigating the cause of autism and chronic illnesses. 

“Let’s return to the core focus of global health and global health security, back to reducing infectious disease burden and the spread of illnesses of pandemic potential. I urge the world's health ministers and the WHO to take our withdrawal from the organization as a wake-up call. It isn’t that President Trump and I have lost interest in international cooperation—not at all. We just want it to happen in a way that’s fair and efficient and transparent for all the member states.”

Kennedy publicly urges other member states to withdraw

Kennedy revealed that he has been privately encouraging other countries to withdraw from the WHO.

“We’ve already been in contact with like-minded countries and we encourage others to consider joining us. We want to free international health from [the] straitjacket of political interference by corrupting influences of the pharmaceutical companies, of adversarial nations and their NGO proxies.”

He then publicly invited the WHO member states to leave the organization.

“I would like to take this opportunity to invite my fellow health ministers around the world into a new era of cooperation. We don’t have to suffer the limits of a moribund WHO. Let’s create new institutions or revisit existing institutions that are lean, efficient, transparent, and accountable.”