U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Argentine counterpart, Minister of Health Mario Lugones, signed a joint declaration Tuesday reaffirming their countries’ withdrawals from the World Health Organization (WHO) and creating an alternative international health system.
“Withdrawal marks the beginning of a new path—toward building a modern global health cooperation model grounded in scientific integrity, transparency, sovereignty, and accountability,” Kennedy and Lugones said.
Kennedy traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, for a two day trip to meet with Lugones and Argentine President Javier Milei to discuss key health priorities, including healthcare reform, “MAHA objectives like addressing chronic disease,” and their new global health collaboration. They also reportedly sought to define “a joint work agenda that will strengthen transparency and trust in the health system”.
Lugones said in a statement that the declaration “expresses a shared vision of the challenges facing the region’s health systems and the measures needed to transform them.”
“Together with Robert Kennedy, we believe in the future of collaboration in global health. We have similar visions about the path forward,” Lugones said.
After the meeting, Kennedy posted on X that they had discussed “the mutual withdrawal of our nations from the WHO and the creation of an alternative international health system based on gold-standard science and free from totalitarian impulses, corruption, and political control.”
Lugones followed up with another post on X touting the “new health paradigm.”
Your visit to Argentina confirms that our countries share the same path: a new health paradigm. We believe in a modern model of global cooperation, based on scientific evidence, transparency, and sovereignty. We are going to deepen cooperation between countries, including in trade. This is the path we are going to follow. And we are already starting down it.
Argentina’s decision to pull out of the WHO was initially declared in February by Milei, following in the footsteps of President Donald Trump who had announced on the day he took office that the United States would withdraw.
On January 20, Trump signed Executive Order 14155 “Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization,” and instructing the Federal Government to “pause the future transfer of any United States Government funds, support, or resources to the WHO.”
Milei’s administration justified its departure from the WHO in a statement on Monday.
“The WHO’s prescriptions do not work because they are not based on science but on political interests and bureaucratic structures that refuse to review their own mistakes,” the statement said.
The Argentine government has previously accused the agency of “disastrous” management during the COVID pandemic with its “caveman quarantine.”
The WHO’s disastrous COVID response also loomed large in Kennedy’s bold address to the Seventy-Eighth World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 20. During his video remarks to the WHO confab, Kennedy explained why the Trump Administration was withdrawing from its organization, and took the opportunity to encourage other countries to do likewise.
RFJ Jr. told assembly that while most of the staff at the WHO are “conscientious people who sincerely believe in what they’re doing,” the UN health agency has become hopelessly compromised by China, gender ideology, and Big Pharma.
“Like many legacy institutions, the WHO has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics,” Secretary Kennedy told the assembly. “While the United States has provided the lion’s share of the organization’s funding historically, other countries such as China have exerted undue influence over its operations in ways that serve their own interests and not particularly the interests of the global public.”
RFK Jr. noted that “this all became obvious” during the pandemic “when the WHO, under pressure from China, suppressed reports at critical junctures of human to human transmission and then worked with China to promote the fiction that COVID originated from bats or pangolins rather than from Chinese government sponsored bio research lab in Wuhan.”
“Not only has the WHO capitulated to political pressure from China, it’s also failed to maintain an organization characterized by transparency and fair governance by and for its Member States,” Kennedy said. “The WHO often acts like it has forgotten that its members must remain accountable to their own citizens and not to transnational or corporate interests.”
“Too often, WHO’s priorities have increasingly reflected the biases and interests of global corporate medicine,” Kennedy continued. “Too often it has allowed political agendas like pushing harmful gender ideology to hijack its core mission. And too often it has become the tool of politics and turned its back on promoting health and health security. Global cooperation on health is still critically important to President Trump and myself, but it isn’t working very well under the WHO as the failures of the COVID era demonstrated.”
RFK Jr. added that the health organization “hasn’t even come to terms with its failures during COVID, let alone made significant reforms.”
“Instead it has doubled down with a pandemic agreement which will lock in all of the dysfunctions of the WHO pandemic response. Well, we’re not going to participate in that,” he declared.