‘Dangerously exposed’: Trump’s cuts leave world vulnerable to next pandemic

The world risks being left “dangerously exposed” to the next pandemic due to staff cuts at the World Health Organization (WHO), experts have warned.

The UN’s health agency is to lose more than a quarter of its workforce by the end of June due to a serious funding crisis caused by Donald Trump withdrawing US support a day into his second presidential term last year.

This month, Argentina also pulled out of WHO and other countries have reduced their support.

Both Trump and Javier Milei, the Argentinian president, previously cited the Geneva-based organisation’s handling of the Covid pandemic as reasons for axing their funding.

By the end of June, the deadline for the job cuts, a total of 2,400 WHO staff will have left the agency out of its 2025 workforce of 9,401.

The i Paper understands that 1,900 people have already left, with about 500 jobs still to go by the end of June.

Fears over pandemic response

The cuts come as non-government organisations (NGOs) are warning that four major conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Iran and Ukraine are having a massive impact on the health of displaced people, putting further pressure on the WHO’s capability to respond to health emergencies.

As The i Paper revealed last month, WHO staff are already training for a “mass casualty” event caused by a potential nuclear or chemical incident from the war in Iran.

But the cuts will underline fears that the agency may not be able to cope with such a catastrophic event or a fresh pandemic on the scale of Covid and in a backdrop of increasingly difficult finances for the funding of global health and development programmes.

Insiders say morale at the WHO is “very low” due to the job cuts but that its leadership, under director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has been put in an impossible position by the US and other members withdrawing or reducing support.

‘A serious strategic error that could backfire badly’

Adrian Lovett, UK executive director of global advocacy organisation the ONE Campaign, said: “Covid showed us that diseases don’t respect borders. The UK may be an island, but our safety depends on strong health systems everywhere, and we are only as safe as the weakest link.

“The World Health Organisation is central to detecting outbreaks early, coordinating global responses, and supporting frontline health systems. Weakening that capacity risks leaving us dangerously exposed to the next pandemic.”

Last year, Keir Starmer announced the UK’s aid budget would be reduced from 0.5 per cent of GDP to 0.3 per cent. Cuts included to programmes created to combat terror and extremism threats in countries such as Sudan, Somalia and Tunisia, and health initiatives that fight the spread of diseases.

The reduction in UK aid spending will pay for an increase in the defence budget to 2.5 per cent by 2027 and 3 per cent over the next parliament.

The ONE campaign, which has a particular focus on Africa, has warned that UK government funding cuts to global health programmes are compounding the risk from the WHO workforce reductions.

Analysis by ONE shows that a combined £550m cut to Gavi, the worldwide vaccine funding partnership, and the Global Fund, could translate to 600,000 fewer lives saved over the next five years

“UK cuts to global health programmes are compounding the risk,” Lovett said.

“In the wake of Covid, this should be the moment to strengthen global health systems, not scale them back. This is a serious strategic error that could backfire badly,” he added.

Pete Baker, deputy director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, said: “WHO staffing cuts were inevitable following US withdrawal and lower contributions from other nations.

“The loss of expertise will leave the world less healthy and less safe from outbreaks and pandemics, and less able to collectively respond to crisis.”

‘More children risk paralysis and death’

Tanya Chinowaita, parliamentary advocacy officer (Child Health) at Results UK, a global health and pandemic preparedness organisation, said: “Cutting infrastructure – whether it’s the surveillance and detection of disease or polio vaccination campaigns – costs lives.”

Cuts to the WHO workforce would “undermine and weaken critical global health systems”, she said.

Half of the 2,400 posts the WHO will lose by the sumer have been cut through natural attrition, voluntary early retirement packages, non-renewal of temporary appointments and interagency transfers, while the other half are through terminations.

“The loss of resources on the ground, combined with reduced institutional capacity, risks slowing momentum at a critical moment when progress on responding to pandemic threats is being made and polio eradication is within reach,” Chinowaita said.

She added that polio eradication depends on “strong support for country programmes, community outreach, and consistent delivery. This is only possible with strong global health infrastructure and this is now being scaled back”: “Cutting staff costs of infrastructure can seem like a low impact way of saving money. In reality these decisions mean that more children risk paralysis and death.”

One of the worst years for the WHO

An insider said that WHO had a tendency to be overly bureaucratic, and while the cuts would have a major impact, they could be used as an opportunity to cut back on that red tape.

Separately, Baker, of the Center for Global Development, said: “Nations need to recommit to funding the WHO. But we also need a new vision for a lean WHO, that focuses its limited budget and staff on its unique global role, leading global collective action to improve and safeguard health, instead of trying to do everything everywhere.”

Professor John Ashton, a former president of the UK faculty of public health and one of the initiators of the WHO’s decades-long health cities project, said: “The bottom line is that WHO needs reform and strengthening, but that if we didn’t have a WHO we would need to create one.

“People think of them like a health authority, but they are not, they are an organisation. They have no authority over nation states.

“It is all about consensus-building. That is hard work to get nations to agree to things.

“WHO are between a rock and a hard place criticised if they do try to act and criticised if they don’t.”

In February, the WHO director general described 2025 as “undeniably one of the most difficult years in our Organization’s history” due to the “significant cuts to our funding [which] left us with no choice but to reduce the size of our workforce”.

There was a drop in external health aid funding to the WHO of between 30 per cent and 40 per cent from 2023 to 2025, “causing immediate and severe disruption to health services in low- and middle-income countries”.

Tedros added: “And sudden and severe cuts to bilateral aid have also caused huge disruptions to health systems and services in many countries.”

Despite this, Tedros said WHO last year assessed and verified about 500 health threats and 50 emergencies in countries around the world.

He said the cuts would also offer an opportunity for a “leaner WHO to become more focused on its core mission and mandate”.