PHM calls for urgent action to preserve, protect, and enhance the work of the World Health Organization
The People’s Health Movement calls for urgent action to preserve, protect and improve the work of the World Health Organization in the wake of the United States government’s intended withdrawal from the multilateral body. The US withdrawal deepens the weakening of the WHO that began in the 1980s with the emergence of an international health governance structure that progressively has supplanted WHO, usurped its functions, reduced its funding, opened the door to interested private donors, impeded the fulfillment of its constitutional mandate, and then ideologically dominated it. All of this has occurred in the context of a neoliberal globalization that dealt a blow to the fundamental principles of multilateralism and handed power over health policy initiatives and decisions, regulations, and program implementation to the World Bank, the WTO, regional and bilateral free trade agreements, and global multi-stakeholder public-private partnerships. The withdrawal of US financial support will produce acute financial deficits for a WHO already severely resource constrained; member states must move quickly to fill the void in order to preserve essential programs. At the same time, the US departure may also be an opportunity to reorient the organization to a more radical and ambitious vision of health multilateralism driven explicitly by the goal of achieving Health for All.