The administration of President Donald Trump continues to move forward with a plan to establish an alternative American system for monitoring and responding to epidemics, following the decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization, according to a report published by the Washington Post, at an estimated cost of about $2 billion annually.
This project, as stated in the report, aims to rebuild the networks and capabilities that the United States had been financially supporting and benefiting from through the international organization at a much lower cost.
## A purely American plan
The US Department of Health and Human Services is leading this trend, after requesting additional funding as part of a broader government process to reshape the American role in the field of global health.
According to officials who spoke to The Washington Post, the plan includes establishing reference laboratories, expanding epidemiological data exchange networks, and developing rapid response systems, which are pillars that Washington had relied on through its membership in the organization before announcing the withdrawal last year, as well as after the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development.
The United States paid about $680 million annually in mandatory and voluntary contributions to global health, which constituted between 15 and 18 percent of the organization’s annual budget of approximately $3.7 billion.
However, the new proposal increases the cost to nearly 3 times this amount, while Trump criticized the organization for what he described as “unfair payments” and “mismanagement” of the Corona pandemic, in addition to accusations of “political” influence from some member states.
Officials confirm in the report that the proposed funding “will build the systems and capabilities that the organization was providing to the United States,” and Washington will rely on the presence of its federal health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Food and Drug Administration, which have a presence in 63 countries, with plans to expand this spread to more than 130 countries through bilateral agreements.
## Experts are skeptical
However, public health experts doubt the feasibility of the project, according to the report.
Tom Ingelsby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, considered that spending “two or three times” to rebuild what was already available through the organization “is not consistent with the good governance of public funds.”
He warned that Washington may not obtain the same level of information or influence outside the multilateral framework.
“The proposal comes after severe cuts in global health programs,” said Atul Gawande, a professor at Harvard Medical School.
He considered that establishing an alternative entity “will not compensate for the losses, but will cost more and achieve less,” especially since the organization provides access channels to countries that do not share their health data directly with the United States.
Data provided by the proposal indicate that the outbreak of some viruses, such as Ebola, has doubled four times since the mid-1990s, and that a pandemic the size of Corona may cost the global economy about 375 billion dollars per month.
Specialists confirm that containing diseases at their source is much less expensive than emergency response within American territory.
On the other hand, the United Nations stressed that the American withdrawal “makes the United States and the world less safe.”
American states and cities announced their joining of the organization’s warning and response networks, an indication of the continuing internal debate about the best ways to ensure national health security in an interconnected world.
The question remains, according to the Washington Post, about the ability of the United States to build a parallel global system equivalent in scope and influence to what the organization has provided since its founding in 1948, at a time when epidemiological risks are increasing and the need for broad international coordination is growing.
