Good Riddance: The US Finally Exits the WHO
Promises made. Promises kept.
On January 22, 2026, the United States officially terminated its membership in the World Health Organization. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a joint statement that pulled no punches:
“This action responds to the WHO’s failures during the COVID-19 pandemic and seeks to rectify the harm from those failures inflicted on the American people.”
For those of us who spent years documenting the WHO’s catastrophic missteps—and being labeled conspiracy theorists for our trouble—this moment feels like vindication. But vindication without understanding is hollow. So let’s be clear about why this happened and why it was the right call.
The WHO Rubber-Stamped China’s Lockdowns
Within hours of the announcement, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya found himself in a public exchange with Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 Technical Lead. Van Kerkhove claimed that “lockdowns were never recommended, nor were they a policy recommendation by @WHO.”
Bhattacharya’s response was devastating:
“That is just plain false. The WHO mission to China in 2020 lauded the Chinese lockdown as a success, in effect endorsing the model for the rest of the world.”
He then quoted directly from WHO documents praising China’s “rigorous commitment to slowing transmission” through “non-pharmaceutical measures” and noting how provinces and communities sent “supplies into Hubei.”
When Van Kerkhove tried to spin this as merely “acknowledging that governments had to take tough decisions,” Bhattacharya delivered the kill shot:
“What I’m not reading here is a condemnation of lockdowns at a time where governments worldwide were seriously considering them. If you want the world to trust the WHO, take honest ownership of this failure.”
This is the core of the matter. The WHO didn’t just fail to warn against lockdowns—they endorsed the Chinese model at the most critical moment, when the world was deciding how to respond. WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward returned from his mission to China and effectively rubber-stamped CCP authoritarianism as global health policy.
A Pattern of Failure
The lockdown endorsement wasn’t an isolated mistake. It was part of a pattern that the WHO has never honestly confronted.
Origins Investigation Failure: The WHO’s investigation into COVID-19’s origins was a farce from the start. While intelligence agencies had evidence of sick Wuhan lab researchers in November 2019, the WHO accepted China’s preferred narrative and slow-walked any serious inquiry into the lab-leak hypothesis.
Mask Policy Incoherence: The WHO’s own October 2019 document on non-pharmaceutical interventions for influenza showed masks had limited effectiveness. Yet when the pandemic hit, they reversed course without new evidence, creating whiplash confusion that persists to this day.
Vaccine Passport Hypocrisy: In 2021, the WHO warned against vaccine passports, with Dr. Mike Ryan citing “complex, ethical issues regarding equity” and concerns about isolating poorer countries. Yet they raised no similar concerns about the lockdowns devastating those same poorer countries.
As Brownstone Institute’s Ramesh Thakur documented in “The WHO Keeps Failing Upward,” the organization has a remarkable ability to escape accountability for its failures while accumulating more power. A report from the WHO’s own Independent Panel characterized its COVID performance as a “toxic cocktail” of bad decisions due to “a myriad of failures, gaps and delays.”
The Damage They Caused
Let’s be specific about what the WHO’s “advice” wrought:
Economic Devastation: The World Bank estimated that lockdowns caused an increase of about 100 million people living in extreme poverty. More than 160,000 American businesses closed—60% permanently.
Excess Deaths: Research has shown that following lockdown implementation, excess mortality actually increased. The cure was worse than the disease.
Children Sacrificed: School closures—which earlier pandemic plans never contemplated because they were known to be harmful—devastated a generation. The learning loss, the mental health crisis, the developmental delays—all of this flowed from policies the WHO legitimized.
Sweden’s Vindication: Meanwhile, Sweden—which largely ignored the WHO-endorsed approach—ended up with one of the lowest excess mortality rates worldwide. The control group proved the experiment failed.
As Brownstone documented in their compilation of more than 400 studies on the failure of compulsory COVID interventions: “Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective.”
The Final Insult
Perhaps the most telling detail in the Rubio-Kennedy statement was this:
“Even on our way out of the organization, the WHO tarnished and trashed everything that America has done for it. The WHO refuses to hand over the American flag that hung in front of it, arguing it has not approved our withdrawal and, in fact, claims that we owe it compensation.”
Think about that. The United States was the WHO’s founding member and largest financial contributor. We kept that organization running for decades. And their response to our departure? Petty bureaucratic spite about a flag.
This tells you everything you need to know about what the WHO has become: an organization more concerned with its own perpetuation than with actual public health outcomes.
What Comes Next
The joint statement makes clear that the US will pursue “direct, bilateral, and results-driven partnerships” rather than funding “the bloated and inefficient bureaucracy of the WHO.”
This is the right approach. The COVID pandemic revealed that global health bureaucracies are susceptible to capture by authoritarian regimes, ideological capture by “experts” who prioritize control over evidence, and institutional inertia that prevents course correction even when policies are obviously failing.
The WHO had its chance. It chose to praise China’s authoritarian response. It chose to endorse lockdowns that devastated economies and cost lives. It chose to suppress inquiry into COVID’s origins. It chose to prioritize its relationship with Beijing over its duty to the world.
Now it gets to do all of that without American money.
The Accountability Question
Withdrawing from the WHO is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. We still need answers:
Who at the WHO made the decision to endorse China’s lockdown model?
What communications occurred between WHO leadership and CCP officials?
Why did the WHO suppress early warnings about human-to-human transmission?
Who decided to slow-walk the origins investigation?
Secretary Kennedy has made clear that accountability is part of HHS’s new mission. The WHO withdrawal is Step One. But there are more steps to come.
For now, let’s acknowledge what happened: The United States finally exited an organization that failed us catastrophically, that caused untold suffering through its bad advice, and that to this day refuses to honestly reckon with its failures.
Good riddance.
References:
HHS Joint Statement on WHO Withdrawal (January 22, 2026)
The WHO Keeps Failing Upward - Brownstone Institute
More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions - Brownstone Institute
WHO’s New Pandemic Approach: Expediency over Evidence? - Brownstone Institute
Hoping the UN is next. It’s outlived its own charter
👍🏻🇺🇸✝️‼️