Trump administration rejects WHO pandemic amendments, blasts global interference

President Donald Trump’s administration said Friday the United States was rejecting changes agreed last year for the World Health Organization on its pandemic response, saying they violated US sovereignty.

Trump on returning to office on January 20 immediately began the withdrawal of the United States from the UN body, but the State Department said the language last year would still have been binding on the United States.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, who is a longtime critic of vaccines, said that the changes “risk unwarranted interference with our national sovereign right to make health policy.”

“We will put Americans first in all our actions and we will not tolerate international policies that infringe on Americans’ speech, privacy or personal liberties,” they said in a joint statement.

Rubio and Kennedy disassociated the United States from a series of amendments to the International Health Regulations, which provide a legal framework for combatting diseases, agreed last year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.

The amendments included a stated “commitment to solidarity and equity” in which a new group would study the needs of developing countries in future emergencies.

The amendments came about after the Assembly failed at a more ambitious goal of sealing a new global agreement on pandemics.

The potential treaty had drawn fierce criticism from mostly conservative voices in the United States, Britain and other countries suspicious of global efforts on disease and of vaccines.

The United States, then under president Joe Biden, took part in negotiations but said it did not reach consensus as it demanded protections for US intellectual property rights on vaccine development.

But Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken welcomed the amendments as progress when he convened a meeting on global health in September with counterparts mostly from other developed countries but also India.

In their rejection of the amendments, Rubio and Kennedy also said that the changes “fail to adequately address the WHO’s susceptibility to the political influence and censorship – most notably from China – during outbreaks.”