Last week, Donald Trump announced that the United States would put an end to its relationship with the World Health Organization following his criticisms over the agency’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. The country will now redirect all its WHO funding to other health needs worldwide.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-founded by the former Microsoft CEO is set to become the World Health Organization largest donor if the United States fully withdraws its funding from the agency. The suggestion was first made by the Devex media platform, which analysed the list of the organisation’s contributors in 2018-2019, both intergovernmental and private.
In the last two years the Gates foundation provided 12.12% of WHO’s budget, or $530.9 million, becoming the second-largest contributor behind the US, which endowed the agency with $893 million during those years.
The WHO currently receives funding from its member state organisations and nongovernmental donors. While the states’ funding met through specified quotas is fully flexible and discretionary, any extra money given by governments or private organisations does not need to be flexible, meaning it can be contributed for use in specific areas.
In this Feb. 1, 2019, Bill and Melinda Gates look toward each other and smile while being interviewed in Kirkland, Wash. The couple, whose foundation has the largest endowment in the world, are pushing back against a new wave of criticism about whether billionaire philanthropy is a force for good
At the end of May, the organisation announced that it was seeking to create its own foundation to attract more funding from nongovernmental donors in a sustainable and predictable manner. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that the absence of much flexibility in spending constitutes “one of the greatest threats” to the organisation’s success, as “less than 20% of our budget comes in the form of flexible assessed contributions from member states”.
Shortly after that announcement, Donald Trump declared that the United States would sever all ties with the WHO, and the country’s contributions to the organisation would all be redirected to “other bodies”.
Bill Gates criticised the president’s move, arguing that no donor organisation was “interested in just replacing funds that have been taken away” and urged the United States to continue supporting the global health agenda set by the body. According to the information available on the WHO website, the largest share of both the US and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s contributions to the WHO is devoted to the eradication of polio.
The philanthropist and his co-founded charity have also been major investors in programmes devoted to the development of vaccines, tests and tracking system in the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic. The Microsoft co-founder even said in May, that he recently warned Donald Trump and other high-ranked world officials about the threat of global infectious diseases.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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