Details emerge from Trump’s WHO demands
Some items on the list already enacted; others appear to be politically motivated
GENEVA — In late May, the U.S. ambassador in Geneva, Andrew Bremberg, went on a rescue mission to the World Health Organization headquarters. He told its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, that despite weeks of threats that President Donald Trump would quit the health organization, the relationship could still be salvaged.
Bremberg hand-delivered a list of seven demands that U.S. officials saw as the beginning of discreet discussions.
Hours later, Trump took the lectern outside the White House and blew it all up, announcing that the United States would leave the WHO. The announcement blindsided his own diplomats and Tedros alike.
If Trump thought Tedros would relent under the pressure of a U.S. withdrawal, he was wrong. The WHO leader has refused to make concessions or counter offers, according to American and Western officials. And Trump ultimately made good on his promise to abandon a health agency that the United States helped form a half-century ago.
With Trump’s election defeat, President-elect Joe Biden appears ready to rejoin the global health body. But he will inherit a fractured relationship and must quickly make decisions about how to overhaul an organization that even staunch supporters say is in dire need of change.
While the Trump administration’s demands are now moot, they offer a glimpse into both the growing U.S. frustration with the WHO and Trump’s personal grievances. And as Biden signals a return to multinational diplomacy, the Trump administration’s demands offer a behindthe-scenes glimpse of the dealmaking of a president who favored aggressive, unpredictable moves over more conventional negotiations.
Diplomats and veteran health officials said the list contained reasonable requests that might have been easily negotiated through normal channels. (The WHO has since made some changes anyway.) But it also contained politically sensitive, if not inappropriate, demands.
“It doesn’t seem to reveal a clear strategic vision,” said Gian Luca Burci, a former counsel to the health organization who reviewed the list for the New York Times.
‘Enormous backfire’
Experts said it was easy to see why, in the face of Trump’s withdrawal and his efforts to deflect blame for the pandemic, Tedros chose not to negotiate.
“It was an enormous backfire, and it was bound to be,” added Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor and longtime WHO adviser who also reviewed the list. “It wasn’t a negotiation. It was blackmail.”
The State Department did not directly address its proposed terms but said it had acted in good faith in calling for needed changes.
“At a critical moment when the WHO leadership had the opportunity to rebuild trust among some of its critical member states, it chose a path that did the very opposite and demonstrated its lack of independence from the Chinese Communist Party,” Bremberg, the U.S. ambassador in Geneva, said in a statement.
The WHO did not comment. Several current and former Trump administration officials and Western diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose private conversations.
The final list emerged from discussions between the White House, State Department and the Department of Health and
Human Services. In Geneva, Bremberg consulted with European allies, who were eager to keep Trump from abandoning the health organization, Western diplomats said.
Six big demands
The first item called for investigations into the WHO’s handling of the outbreak and the source of the virus. U.S. officials said they saw this as an easy request; more than 140 countries had already endorsed these investigations.
In July, Tedros would do just that. He appointed Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia, to lead an investigation into the response to the pandemic. A separate investigation into the virus’ origins is slowly getting underway.
Second, the United States asked Tedros to call on China to provide live virus samples and stop censoring Chinese doctors and journalists. Tedros has told colleagues that he sees no benefit in such criticism, especially during a pandemic.
Conceding to the Trump administration’s demand would have meant allowing one country to dictate the organization’s posture toward another. But in Washington, one senior White House official recalled this as a key condition, a signal of Tedros’ independence.
The third item asked Tedros to say that countries were right to consider travel restrictions during the pandemic — a break from the long-standing advice that limiting travel would not slow the virus but would harm economies and delay medical treatment.
The WHO had already begun to soften that stance by the time Bremberg delivered the list. In April, the organization called for “appropriate and proportionate restrictions” on domestic and international travel.
But Tedros interpreted the request as demanding that he apologize to Trump and say the president was right to restrict travel from China, according to public health officials and diplomats who have talked to him.
The fourth item on the list called for the WHO to dispatch a team to Taiwan to study its successful pandemic response. Taiwan is not a member of the health organization, and Beijing, which claims the self-ruled island as its own, exerts tremendous pressure to keep the WHO from engaging with Taiwan’s government.
The U.S. requests also called for the WHO to prequalify coronavirus drugs and vaccines for use around the world once they were authorized by major regulators in the United States, Canada, Europe or Japan. That could help fast-track important treatments, but it could also have been seen as allowing the United States to influence the health organization’s drug-approval policy.
The Trump administration also asked Tedros to ensure that countries like the United States that contribute heavily to the WHO are proportionally represented on the organization’s staff. And it sought support for proposed changes put forward by the Group of 7 — the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Canada and Italy. That request is moot, as the G-7 proposal has been folded into larger overhaul efforts.