FIRST ON FOX: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sent a fiery prerecorded video to be broadcast before the World Health Assembly, which gathers member states of the World Health Organization, on Tuesday outlining why President Donald Trump is withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO.
“Like many legacy institutions, the WHO has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest and international power politics,” Kennedy said in a video exclusively shared with Fox News Digital.
“While the United States has provided the lion’s share of the organization’s funding historically, other countries such as China have exerted undue influence over its operations in ways that serve their own interests and not particularly the interests of the global public.”
Kennedy’s video, however, did not appear to air during the assembly’s gathering on Tuesday.
Video messages from foreign leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte were aired during a meeting Tuesday morning, as well as live remarks from Vice Premier of China Liu Guozhong, but Kennedy’s video did not appear to be shown, according to Fox News Digital’s review of the assembly’s livestream.
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The World Health Assembly kicked off Monday in Geneva, where the WHO’s 194 member states convened its 78th annual meeting. Kennedy’s office sent the video to be featured during the assembly’s meeting Tuesday morning, alongside other videos of world and health leaders addressing the body.
Fox News Digital reached out to the WHO’s media team requesting details on why the video was not aired Tuesday and if the assembly planned to show it at a later time, but did not immediately receive a reply.
This year, the WHO member states are anticipated to sign a “pandemic agreement” that aims “to safeguard the world from a repeat of the suffering caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the body.
Kennedy’s video addressed the pandemic specifically, saying the World Health Organization’s handling of COVID-19 was riddled with “failures” and exposed that the WHO “capitulated” to China. The WHO is a specialized agency focused on international health that is overseen by the United Nations.
“The WHO, under pressure from China, suppressed reports at critical junctures of human-to-human transmission and then worked with China to promote the fiction that COVID originated from bats or pangolins rather than from Chinese government-sponsored research at a biolab in Wuhan,” Kennedy said.
“Not only has the WHO capitulated to political pressure from China, it’s also failed to maintain an organization characterized by transparency and fair governance. … The WHO often acts like it has forgotten that its members must remain accountable to their own citizens and not to transnational or corporate interests,” he continued.
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Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office this year announcing the U.S.’ intention to withdraw from the WHO due to its mishandling of the pandemic, as well as a host of other issues the president took issue with, such as “onerous payments” that didn’t match contributions from other member states.
“The United States noticed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states. In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments,” Trump’s EO stated.
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Kennedy continued in his video that “global cooperation on health is still critically important to President Trump and myself” while knocking the WHO for repeated “failures” during the pandemic that the body has since further embraced through its anticipated “pandemic agreement.”
“It isn’t working very well under the WHO. As the failures of the COVID era demonstrate, the WHO has not even come to terms with its failures during COVID, let alone made significant reforms. Instead, it has doubled down with the pandemic agreement, which will lock in all of the dysfunctions of the WHO pandemic response.”
“We’re not going to participate in that,” Kennedy said. “We need to reboot the whole system, as we are doing in the United States. Here in the United States, we’re going to continue to focus on infectious disease and pandemic preparedness, but we’re also fundamentally shifting the priorities of our health agencies to focus on chronic diseases, which are prevalent in the United States.”
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