‘We’re Flying Blind’: Harvard Researchers Warn of Risks after U.S. WHO Withdrawal

Harvard public health experts warned that the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization is cutting off critical disease surveillance data, leaving researchers without the information they need to detect emerging global health threats.

The loss, they said, has been compounded by the Trump administration’s decision to halt funding for key global health surveys — moves that experts argue are disrupting public health research and weakening global disease preparedness.

On Jan. 22, the Departments of Health and Human Services and State announced that the U.S. had formally completed its withdrawal from the WHO. President Donald Trump first ordered the pullout in a day-one executive order in January 2025, ending U.S. participation in the 77-year-old international body that coordinates global disease surveillance and public health emergency responses.

The administration cited what it described as the WHO’s vulnerability to “inappropriate political influence,” its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a lack of “meaningful reforms” post-pandemic as justification for the decision. The withdrawal ended all U.S. funding, staffing, and partnerships with the organization.

Public health scholars at Harvard said the consequences of the decision are immediate and dangerous.

Jesse B. Bump, a lecturer in Global Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health, said leaving the WHO severs U.S. access to a vast international surveillance network that tracks emerging diseases and shares laboratory data used to guide outbreak responses and vaccine development.

“Where does the data come from?” he said. “This is the most immediate thing.”

The impact is already visible domestically, he added, with disruptions rippling through research agencies and universities.

“Now, our productivity is really falling with the disruption of NIH and the redirection of federal resources,” he said. “This uncertainty does kill people.”

Bump, who studies the development of health systems and international organizations, said the absence of WHO data would leave researchers less prepared to help detect and contain future outbreaks.

“We’re flying blind on a lot of fronts,” he said.

In a statement to The Crimson, an HHS spokesperson said the administration would rely on domestic institutions rather than what it described as “unaccountable” individuals at the WHO that have “repeatedly failed the American people.” The spokesperson did not directly address concerns about the loss of international disease surveillance data.

David Blumenthal ’70, a Public Health and Health Policy professor at Harvard, described the withdrawal as “unwise from the standpoint of the protection of Americans’ health.”

“There’s no question that to protect the United States from infectious illness, from environmental threats, and to learn about how to improve health requires really very robust international collaboration,” he said. “WHO provided that.”

The U.S. was the WHO’s largest donor in 2022 and 2023, contributing nearly $1.3 billion over two years. Bump stressed that the withdrawal weakens health protections far beyond U.S. borders.

“The rest of the world is also endangered,” Bump said. “The surveillance data that CDC will get is not being shared.”

In a statement in response to the U.S. withdrawal, the WHO wrote that the decision makes “both the United States and the world less safe” and rejected claims that the organization failed during the pandemic.

The WHO pullout is not the White House’s only move reshaping global health research. In February 2025, the administration also terminated funding for Demographic and Health Surveys, a separate but critical U.S.-backed program that for decades has collected standardized survey data in low- and middle-income countries.

Though the program operates independently of the WHO, researchers said its suspension compounds the loss of comparative global health data.

“If you’ve read any paper that compared five countries and their rates of some disease or other, you can be sure they used DHS data,” Bump said.

The surveys have underpinned thousands of academic studies and informed policymaking worldwide. Their sudden halt, he added, has disrupted research across schools like HSPH.

“There are people at every school of public health in the country whose entire career is based on DHS data,” Bump said.

Blumenthal also questioned the administration’s proposal to spend $2 billion annually to build a U.S.-led alternative to the WHO, suggesting the WHO was already capable of performing many of those functions more efficiently.

“It is reassuring that at least the administration understands that it cannot protect the health of Americans without deep involvement internationally,” Blumenthal said. “For the U.S. to build the WHO from scratch strikes me as an impractical and unwise way to proceed.”

—Staff writer Riya S. Shah can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at riyas.23. Follow her on X @RiyaShah233.

—Staff writer Juliana L. Yao can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at jly.87. Follow her on X @JulianaYao298.