As the 78th World Health Assembly was taking place on Tuesday in Geneva, of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a formal statement calling on nations around the world to break from the World Health Organization.
"I urge the world's health ministers and the WHO to take our withdrawal from the organization as a wake-up call," Kennedy said in a video address.
The announcement came amid the United States' own decoupling from the agency. On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing the government's withdrawal from the agency via a "pause" on the "future transfer of any ... funds, support, or resources to the WHO."
In his video address, Kennedy described the agency as a "straitjacket of political interference by corrupting influences of the pharmaceutical companies, of adversarial nations and their [nongovernmental organization] proxies" that has become "mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics."
As a solution, the secretary called for a "reboot" of "the whole system," which in the U.S. now consists of "fundamentally shifting the priorities of our health agencies to focus on chronic diseases."
"We're going to support lifestyle changes that will bolster the immune systems and transform the health of our people," he said, noting that "few of these efforts lend themselves easily to profits or serve established special interests."
In his announcement, Kennedy was critical of China and the WHO for their role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Criticism of the United States' role in funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was absent.
Still, Kennedy has been critical of gain-of-function research in his formal capacity as HHS secretary and has called for a review of mRNA vaccines, the novel treatment dispersed on the public in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nick Koutsobinas ✉
Nick Koutsobinas, a Newsmax writer, has years of news reporting experience. A graduate from Missouri State University’s philosophy program, he focuses on exposing corruption and censorship.
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