Trump’s WHO Alternative Will Not Prevent Pandemic Totalitarianism.
To do so, DJT would have to confront the hydra.
***A version of this article was kindly published by UnHerd. You can read it 👉 here 👈***
On the 20th of January 2025, President Trump excitedly announced his intention to withdraw the United States of America from the World Health Organisation (WHO). A year later—which is to say, about a month ago—his White House followed through on its commitment and the USA formally ended its membership of the WHO, citing, amongst other things, the “profound failures in [the organisation’s] handling of the COVID-19 pandemic”. This refers, again amongst other things, to the WHO’s endorsement of totalitarian mass quarantines (or ‘lockdowns’). As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health Secretary, and Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, explained in a joint statement, this withdrawal is “for the Americans who died alone in nursing homes, the small businesses devastated by WHO-driven restrictions, and the American lives shattered by this organization’s inactivity.”
Does this mean that Trump’s White House is giving up on the global (or quasi-global) health project? Seemingly not: nestled in the original announcement is the following line, “The Secretary of State and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall take appropriate measures, with all practicable speed to [...] identify credible and transparent United States and international partners to assume necessary activities previously undertaken by WHO.” What this means was partially clarified this week when the Washington Post exclusively reported that Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services is leading efforts to construct a US-led rival to the WHO that “first and foremost protects Americans” (the parallels with Trump’s recently-formed ‘Board of Peace’ alternative to the United Nations are striking here).
A cynic could be forgiven for reading this as the Trump administration’s attempt to shift blame for a damaging, totalitarian pandemic response, the first part of which its leader, at least nominally, oversaw. But let’s shelve cynicism for now and focus instead on the claim that pandemic totalitarianism was “WHO-driven” and the implication that a US-led alternative will avoid said totalitarianism next time (remember: there will be a next time).
The former is a flat misapprehension. The pandemic response was not “driven” by any single directive intelligence or leviathan’s—be it the WHO, WEF, or CCP—edicts. Instead, it emerged from interactions in a much broader network of actors with overlapping but distinctive practices and priorities, including but not limited to: disease surveillance systems in search of microscopic monsters to destroy; clinicians standardising and circulating case-definitions for a new disease; epidemiologists collecting data based on these definitions; modellers trained to represent the world and model interventions such as quarantine in terms of statistical indicators; drug developers promising silver bullets (e.g. vaccines) to perennial terrors (e.g. plagues); politicians worrying about health system overwhelm and feeling pressure to do something major; and citizens—yes, you and I—buying that something major needed to be done. Pandemic totalitarianism was less leviathan and more hydra. The WHO’s ‘meta-governmental’ role in organising parts of this network and specifying ‘best practice’ policies should not be minimised, but in scapegoating it as pandemic totalitarianism’s prime mover, the Trump administration is trading in a lazy simplification.
While it is still too early to tell, nothing suggests that Trump’s para-system of global health—assuming that it manifests (a big assumption, admittedly)—will meaningfully differ from what came before. The Post’s report only says that a “US-run alternative would re-create systems such as laboratories, data-sharing networks and rapid-response systems.” Given the administration’s flawed understanding of COVID-19 policy, this reads like a charter to re-create (or, more likely, maintain) the existing network of people and organisations—i.e. the preconditions of pandemic totalitarianism—just with vaguely ‘America First’ characteristics. And guarantees from Kennedy and his team that they would avoid making the same mistakes should not allay our worries: political economists have shown that organisational opportunities for totalitarianism can lie dormant for years, if not decades, long outlasting any single administration’s incumbency.
Ultimately, just as investing in the state’s ‘defence’ capacity means investing in its capacity to control and harm human beings, including its own citizens, re-creating the network alluded to above means re-creating a polity’s potential for pandemic totalitarianism (whatever form it takes: mass quarantine, mass vaccination, mandatory testing, etc.). Unfortunately, the Trump administration has yet to demonstrate the big-picture appreciation of organisational dynamics that properly confronting the threat of pandemic totalitarianism demands.
Whilst I agree the pandemic response wasn’t driven by any single group, the Epstein documents reveal some of the interconnected individuals and groups involved before hand. I also agree with your premise that one shouldn’t fall into the trap of trusting any new US initiative, especially given the administration’s recent push-backs on its earlier “drain the swamp” promises.
Many of the medical scientists I follow on substack have demonstrated a somewhat wholistic view of things, by which I mean they will venture into non-medical subjects as they see the interconnectivity of it all. My hope is that their voices help in understanding that there’s no requirement for any WHO-like organisation that does not take a similar wholistic view.