Right-Wing Dark Money Pushed For Trump’s WHO Exit
Nonprofits funded by wealthy individuals have been working to undermine global health.
Written by Natalie Jonas and Walker Bragman Published: 1/23/25
Donald Trump had barely been sworn in when he put pen to paper and announced the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN agency charged with overseeing global health.
The move was part of a suite of day-one executive orders by the returning president and came as no surprise. Not only did it mark the fulfillment of a campaign promise, it represented the resumption of an unfinished plan from his first term. In July 2020, with his reelection prospects faltering over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump had turned his ire on the international body, accusing it of mismanagement and announcing that the U.S. would withdraw. However, thanks to a 1948 U.S. resolution mandating a year’s notice and the payment of whatever outstanding funds are owed before exiting the WHO, it was never completed, and President Biden reversed course.
But now back in the White House, Trump is finishing what he started.
“The United States noticed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states,” the White House announcement read. “In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments.”
As much the order represented a personal victory for Trump, it was also a win for business-aligned right-wing dark money groups, which have long been mobilizing against the WHO as the agency has been hammering out details of a pandemic preparedness treaty meant to enable better international cooperation in the face of infectious disease threats.
One of the major organizations working to undermine the treaty was the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential right-wing think tank in America, which once boasted of its influence on Trump’s COVID response in its 2020 annual report. Heritage, which was founded in the early 1970s with funding from beer magnate Joseph Coors and has long received contributions from major corporate interests and the ultra-wealthy like billionaire Charles Koch, opposed public health efforts to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To that end, it amplified misinformation and contrarian voices and even published a reopening plan early in 2020 before vaccines were available.
“Trump has signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the atrocious World Health Organization 🔥,” the official Heritage X account posted along with a video of the signing.
Heritage has been churning out anti-WHO reports and commentary for years. In February 2023, the group published a report detailing why the U.S. should oppose the zero draft of the pandemic treaty, noting that it would “trampl[e] intellectual property rights” and give the WHO unfettered access to 20 percent of the production of pandemic-preparedness goods such as vaccines and PPE.
In actuality, however, the World Trade Organization will continue to govern intellectual property rights. Moreover, the pandemic access and benefit-sharing (PABS) system in the draft treaty would not have given the WHO unfettered access to pandemic-related goods. While it did reserve 20 percent of pandemic-related products arising from the PABS system for the WHO, just 10 percent would have been in the form of a donation to the organization. The other 10 percent would have been at “affordable” prices.
The Heritage report also claimed that the draft treaty constituted an assault on free speech partially due to language about tackling mis- and disinformation. The zero draft called for educational and awareness programs on pandemics and the effects as well as effective risk communication and management of “infodemics” through “effective channels, including social media.” Heritage also attacked the treaty’s emphasis on “equity”and called the document, as a whole, “significantly flawed.”
In June, Heritage published a piece dubbing the treaty “a WHO-provided lesson in how not to prevent future pandemics.” It excoriated the international agency for failing to ensure transparency from countries like China and instead focusing “on resource and technology transfers to developing countries (including China), encouraging overriding intellectual-property rights, and creating a new WHO bureaucracy to oversee distribution and manufacturing of pandemic-related materials such as vaccines.”
Heritage’s infamous Project 2025 roadmap for a second Trump term, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” also took aim at the WHO, accusing the international agency of “corruption” throughout the COVID pandemic and citing it as an example of the “danger that international organizations pose to U.S. citizens and interests.”
While “Mandate for Leadership” did not immediately call for withdrawal from the WHO, it did demand that the U.S. “end blind support for international organizations” and add that “serious consideration should also be given to withdrawal from organizations that no longer have value, quietly undermine U.S. interests or goals, or disproportionately rely on U.S. financial contributions to survive.”
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Heritage is not the only dark money outfit that has been targeting the WHO. In February 2024, Alliance Defending Freedom, which has been designated as an anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, also highlighted language in the zero draft of the treaty related to misinformation and disinformation as a threat to “freedom of expression.”
“The current draft of the WHO Pandemic Agreement implies that people must be protected from ‘information’ that could subjectively be labelled ‘misleading’ or simply considered ‘too much’ by authorities,” said Giorgio Mazzoli, the group’s director of UN advocacy.
Like Heritage, ADF is backed by major wealthy interests. In 2023, for example, Stand Together Trust, one of the dark money funding vehicles affiliated with Koch, gave it $895,000.
Meanwhile, a coalition of right-wing and conspiracy-promoting anti-vaccine dark money groups and individuals signed onto a “declaration” demanding the U.S. withdraw from the WHO over the pandemic treaty.
The so-called American Sovereignty Declaration lambasted the agency for allegedly covering up COVID’s origins (zoonosis remains the favored explanation by experts) and accused it of being “underwritten and malignly influenced by other hostile special interests, including Bill Gates and Big Pharma.”
“Their efforts to expand the WHO’s supranational control align with Beijing’s,” it read.
The declaration claimed that the treaty would empower the agency to impose “vaccine passports” adding that “Once combined with an interoperable, global Central Bank Digital Currencies (also under development and backed by the Chinese Communist Party, the Biden administration, the World Economic Forum, World Bank, G20, and other supranational globalist organizations), the WHO could enforce its medical tyranny by severing unvaccinated individuals from their bank accounts and credit cards.”
Behind the declaration was the so-called Sovereignty Coalition, which was formed in June 2023 by the Center for Security Policy, an anti-Muslim think tank that authored guidelines the Trump administration referenced when it proposed its “Muslim ban,” and Women's Rights Without Frontiers, a group that campaigns against forced sterilization and abortion in China as it relates to the now-defunct “One Child Policy.” The Center for Security Policy has received funding from major right-wing groups sources including $275,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which also gave $200,000 to Heritage. The private foundation—one of the Scaife foundations affiliated with the Mellon family and the late billionaire industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife—is headed up by Michael Gleba, who is also a Heritage trustee. It has been a major funder of causes like climate change denial and of pro-business, right-wing groups.
Among the declaration’s signatories were a number of well-funded right-wing dark money groups. For example, there was Tea Party Patriots Action, the social welfare arm of Tea Party Patriots, which was organized by FreedomWorks, a group that spun out of the Koch political influence network.
TPP Action helped fuel anti-COVID lockdown demonstrations across the U.S. in early 2020 and provided funding for the misinformation-spreading, pro-Trump doctor group America’s Frontline Doctors. In the summer of 2021, TTP Action published a parents’ how-to guide to “stop medical mandates”—mask and vaccine requirements and school closures.
Another signatory was the anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute, a dark money group established to undermine and politicize pandemic control measures. The group has ties to key appointees in the Trump administration, including Robert Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (National Institutes of Health), and Dr. Marty Makary (Food and Drug Administration).
Brownstone’s funding is opaque, but Important Context has previously revealed several of the sources. The group was founded in 2021 by anarcho-capitalist Jeffrey Tucker, a longtime veteran of the world of right-wing dark money. Tucker was previously the editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank that has received some funding from Koch’s foundation and got $100,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2023.
Like Heritage, Brownstone has sought to undermine the WHO. In August 2023, it launched a project called “Re-Evaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda,” or REPPARE, with the University of Leeds in the UK and the University of Ghent in Belgium. The project aims to rework the global framework for future pandemic responses from international organizations like the WHO.
The REPPARE group published a report last February devaluing the risk of pandemic spread and stating, “The urgency involved in the pandemic preparedness agenda is either contrary to evidence or poorly supported by it.” The report goes on to note that the WHO, the G20 and the World Bank conducts analyses that are “disappointing in terms of scholarship and balance” and that such data and reporting is overemphasized for fiscal gain.
Negotiations for the WHO treaty began in 2021 with the aim of creating a legally binding framework for member states’ role in pandemic preparedness, prevention and response that builds upon the existing International Health Regulations. The proposals have included taking a One Health approach to future pandemics, meaning studying how animal, human, and environmental health intersect.
But multiple rounds of negotiations have failed to produce consensus and many uncertainties remain. Right-wing dark money groups have made the difficult negotiations even more fraught, riling people up. Last January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lamented the “torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories” directed toward the treaty and the agency.
This past May, all 49 Senate Republicans sent a letter to then-President Biden calling the WHO “dysfunctional” and for a withdrawal of his administration’s support of the draft pandemic treaty. A final vote on the treaty is expected before May 2025, after a lack of consensus delayed the timeline from May of last year.
In the wake of Trump’s order, public health experts took to social media to express their alarm at the prospect of a U.S. withdrawal from the WHO. The agency has played a key role in providing support for countries facing diseases like Ebola, Zika, polio and, of course, COVID-19.
Dr. Martin McKee, a professor of public health and former president of the European Public Health Association, warned that Trump’s decision threatened to “weaken WHO, isolate the US, and undermine global health diplomacy when unity is most needed.”
Vaccine scientist and pediatrician Dr. Peter Hotez, meanwhile, tweeted that he expected the exit to “weaken our nation’s biosecurity/pandemic preparedness at a time when pathogens like H5N1, SARS-like CoVs, dengue/arboviruses accelerating bc climate change/urbanization.”
The coming U.S. exit from the WHO will not only hurt the agency, costing it its largest donor and approximately 16 percent of its funding—well over $1 billion in 2022 and 2023 combined. It will also mean the severing of ties between the WHO and the FDA and CDC at a critical time when the U.S. is facing spiraling avian flu outbreaks among livestock across the nation.
In 2020, ProPublica reported that former Trump administration officials worried that leaving the WHO would impact the near-eradication of wild-type polio, which has since seen a resurgence in Pakistan and Afghanistan despite global efforts. In 2022, an adult in New York City was diagnosed with polio—the first case in the U.S. in almost a decade. The same year, the polio virus was found in the wastewater in counties in the New York area.
The WHO exit is not the only controversial public health decision Trump has made in the first days of his presidency. The president issued a directive to pause all public communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. The directive will be in place until February 1, according to a follow-up memo, and require all communications to be approved by a political appointee.