The World Health Organization (WHO) began its annual meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, by calling for billions of dollars in funding from member countries.
Speaking at the meeting, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for member nations to support the entity by providing $2.1 billion, calling the number “extremely modest.”
“We are not naïve to that challenge, but for an organization working on the ground in 150 countries, with the vast mission and mandate that Member States have given us, US$ 4.2 billion for two years – or 2.1 billion a year – is not ambitious, it’s extremely modest,” he stated.
Ghebreyesus argued that $2.1 billion is the “equivalent of global military expenditure every eight hours,” the “price of one stealth bomber,” and is “one-quarter of what the tobacco industry spends on advertising and promotion every single year.”
“If we think US$ 2.1 billion a year is ambitious – or 4.2 billion for the biennium – then either we must lower our ambitions for what WHO is and does, or we must raise the money,” the director-general added, urging nations to support his call.
Matthew Kavanagh, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics, said countries have used the United States’ cut in funding to reduce their aid to the organization.
“The WHO faces an existential crisis that goes well beyond a budget gap to the question of whether this sort of multilateralism can succeed in addressing global health in this new era of nationalism and misinformation,” Kavanaugh said, as reported by the Associated Press.
In January, President Donald Trump moved to pull the United States from the WHO, stating that the entity “continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.”
