WHO Announces ‘Significant’ Layoffs Three Months After Trump Halts US Funding

Three months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO) - they’re now suffering from a ‘large salary gap’ and have ‘no choice but to reduce the scale of our work and workforce’ with ‘significant’ layoffs, according to AFP, citing director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Of note, the WHO has received over $3.5 billion from US taxpayers since 2010.

In Trump’s Jan. 20 order halting US funding from the United Nations body, the president cited WHO’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China,” as well as other global health concerns. It was Trump’s second attempt to withdraw from the WHO – the first being in 2020 over the WHO’s complicity in China’s coverup of details surrounding the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to praising Beijing for its response to Covid, recommending against travel restrictions over “stigma,” flip-flopping on the use of masks during the pandemic and claiming asymptomatic spread of COVID was ‘highly unlikely’, the WHO halted a 2020 study on the effect of Hydroxychloroquine on coronavirus.

In a May 2020 letter to Tedros, Trump listed several claims from the WHO about the coronavirus “that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading,” including:

• On January 14, 2020, the World Health Organization gratuitously reaffirmed China’s now-debunked claim that the coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans, stating: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) identified in Wuhan, China.” This assertion was in direct conflict with censored reports from Wuhan.

• On January 21, 2020, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured you not to declare the corona virus outbreak an emergency. You gave in to this pressure the next day and told the world that the coronavirus did not pose a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Just over one week later, on January 30, 2020, overwhelming evidence to the contrary forced you to reverse course.

• On January 28, 2020, after meeting with President Xi in Beijing, you praised the Chinese government for its “transparency” with respect to the coronavirus, announcing that China had set a “new standard for outbreak control” and “bought the world time.” You did not mention that China had, by then, silenced or punished several doctors for speaking out about the virus and restricted Chinese

This is the letter sent to Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization. It is self-explanatory! pic.twitter.com/pF2kzPUpDv

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 19, 2020

According to Tedros, “The refusal of the US to pay its assessed contributions for 2024 and 2025, combined with reductions in official development assistance by some other countries, means we are facing a salary gap for the 2026–27 biennium of between $560 and $650 million.”

The lower end of that spectrum “represents about 25 percent of staff costs,” he continued, adding that “that doesn’t necessarily mean a 25-percent cut to the number of positions.”

As such, “we will be saying goodbye to a significant number of colleagues.”

Tedros insisted that the most significant impact would likely be felt at the organisation’s headquarters in Geneva. “We are starting with reductions in senior management,” he said.

“We are reducing the senior leadership team at headquarters from 12 to seven, and the number of departments will be reduced by (more than) half, from 76 to 34,” Tedros said.

WHO’s regional offices would meanwhile be affected “to varying degrees”, he said, adding that some country offices in wealthier countries would likely be closed.

“These are very painful decisions for all of us,” Tedros said.

The WHO chief insisted the situation could have been worse.

WHO member states agreed in 2022 to significantly increase membership fees and reduce the portion of WHO’s budget covered by less reliable and often earmarked voluntary contributions. -AFP

The WHO employs more than 8,000 people worldwide.