Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Recorded Message to the World Health Assembly

First Published 20 May 2025

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[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio]

To my colleagues in public health:

I'm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary.

As you know, President Trump has made the decision to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization. I'd like to take this opportunity to offer some background to that decision and more importantly to chart a future path toward global cooperation on health and health security.

Like many legacy institutions, the W-H-O has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics. 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.

This all became obvious during the COVID pandemic when the W-H-O, 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 a Chinese government-sponsored research at a biolab in Wuhan.¹ Not only has the W-H-O capitulated to political pressure from China, it's also failed to maintain an organization characterized by transparency and fair governance by and for its member states. The W-H-O often acts like it has forgotten that its members must remain accountable to their own citizens and not to transnational or corporate interest[s].

Now, I believe that for the most part the staff of the W-H-O are conscientious people who sincerely believe in what they're doing. And -- And indeed, the W-H-O has since its inception accomplished important work, including the eradication of smallpox.

Too often, though, W-H-O's priorities have increasingly reflected the biases and interests of corporate medicine. Too often, it has allowed political agendas, like pushing harmful gender ideology, to hijack its core mission. And -- And too often, it has become the tool of politics and turned its back on promoting health and health security.

Global cooperation on health is still critically important to President Trump and myself, but it isn't working very well under the W-H-O as the failures of the COVID era demonstrate. The W-H-O 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 W-H-O pandemic response.

Well, we're not going to participate in that. 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. It's the chronic disease epidemic that is sickening our people and bankrupting our health care system.

We're now pivoting to make our health care system more responsive to this reality. We're going to make healthcare in the United States serve the needs of the public instead of industry profit-taking. We're removing food dyes and other harmful additives from our food supply. We're investigating the causes of autism and other chronic diseases. We're seeking to reduce consumption of ultra-processed foods. And we're going to support lifestyle changes that will bolster the immune systems and transform the health of our people.

Few of these efforts lend themselves easily to profits or serve established special interest[s]. These changes can only occur through the kind of systemic overhaul that President Trump has brought to our country. We'd like to see a similar reordering of priorities on the global stage, especially considering the fact that, through the leadership of the United States and funding from our country over the past 25 years, millions of global citizens have seen a reduction in premature death due to HIV, TB, and malaria.

Let's return to the core focus of global health and global health security back to reducing infectious disease burden and the spread of diseases of pandemic potential.

I urge the world's health ministers and the W-H-O to take our withdrawal from the organization as a wake-up call. It isn't that President Trump and I have lost interest in international cooperation -- not at all. We just want it to happen in a way that's fair and efficient and transparent for all the member states.

We've already been in contact with like-minded countries and we encourage others to consider joining us. We want to free international health cooperation from the straight jacket of political interference by corrupting influences of the pharmaceutical companies, of adversarial nations and their NGO proxies.

I would like to take this opportunity to invite my fellow health ministers around the world into a new era of cooperation. We don't have to suffer the limits of a more abundant W-H-O. Let's create new institutions or revisit existing institutions that are lean, efficient, transparent, and accountable. Whether it's an emergency outbreak of an infectious disease or the pervasive rot of chronic conditions that have been overtaking not just America but the whole world, we're ready to work with you.

Thank you and may God bless you. And let's all pray for the health of our children and our grandchildren.

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