Replug: Global Health Insecurity in a Second Trump Term [Guest Essay]

Newsletter Edition #238 [The Files In-Depth]

We first published this piece on November 19, 2024. We are sharing with our readers again in case some of you missed it.

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Hi,

The Trump win is expected to set in motion seismic changes in geopolitics with deep implications for global health.

The impacts are expected to be felt not only in the corridors of World Health Organization in Geneva, but will also reverberate in premier global health agencies, across many ministeries of health, countless partnerships and civil society organizations in many parts of the world.

In today’s guest essay, leading global health legal scholar Lawrence O. Gostin of Georgetown University, lays out for our readers the multi-layer impact of the Trump Presidency.

We will be following developments in Geneva, as geopolitics fuses with the technical aspects of global health, with the potential for shaping the field in definitive ways in the near to the medium term.

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Until later!

Priti

Feel free to write to us: patnaik.reporting@gmail.com, Follow us on X: @filesgeneva

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Illustration Credit: Amy Clarke, Chembe Collaborative

I. GUEST ESSAY

Global Health Insecurity in a Second Trump Term

By Lawrence O. Gostin

Gostin is Distinguished University Professor, Georgetown University and Director, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Washington, D.C., USA. He can be reached at gostin@georgetown.edu.

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I have worked in global public health since the first cases of HIV were reported in 1980. I have led the WHO Collaborating Center on Global Health Law, and worked in the White House and with US agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In all this time, I have never seen a darker day for global health than the election of Donald Trump to a second term.

Trump’s core “America First” values are anathema to the animating principles of global health—mutual solidarity, international cooperation, an abiding concern for marginalized and disadvantaged people, and equitable access to lifesaving public health tools. At his core, Trump disdains international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) and global agreements like the International Health Regulations (2005, amended in 2024) (IHR), a future Pandemic Treaty, and the Paris Agreement.

In the next four years, the Trump administration will retreat from global health governance, slash financing, withdraw from international agreements, and direct funds toward anti-health priorities. All of this, and more, will have vast implications for health everywhere but particularly for the world’s most vulnerable.

Here are six areas of global health that will be severely disrupted by a second Trump term.

Image Credit: Photo by Steve Johnson, Pexels