US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. has called on member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) to "consider joining" the United States, which has begun the process of leaving the organization.
The US was the largest donor to the WHO, which Washington's departure and its refusal to pay its membership fees for 2024 and 2025 have put in serious financial difficulties.
"I urge health ministers around the world and the WHO to see our withdrawal from the organization as a wake-up call," Kennedy said in a video message, adding that the US "has already reached out to like-minded people and is encouraging others to consider joining them."
Kennedy, a long-time critic of the WHO and opponent of vaccines, in his message to the WHO Assembly, which is in session in Geneva, called the WHO an "arrogant and moribund" organization that is "under excessive influence from China," gender ideology, and the pharmaceutical industry.
"WHO is mired in excessive bureaucracy, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest and international power games," Kennedy said, adding that he wants to free international health cooperation from "the shackles of political interference and corrupting influences."
Kennedy assessed that WHO's priorities "increasingly reflect the biases and interests" of medical companies, and that WHO "too often allowed political issues, such as the promotion of harmful ideology, to distract it from its core mission."
Upon returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump initiated a year-long process by which the US would leave the WHO.
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