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[ti-amie]

After leaving WHO, Trump officials propose more expensive replacement to duplicate it

HHS proposes spending $2 billion a year to re-create systems the U.S. accessed through the WHO at a fraction of the cost, according to officials briefed on the matter.
February 19, 2026 at 11:01 a.m. ESTToday at 11:01 a.m. EST

By Lena H. Sun
and
Jacob Bogage

After pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Trump administration is proposing spending $2 billion a year to replicate the global disease surveillance and outbreak functions the United States once helped build and accessed at a fraction of the cost, according to three administration officials briefed on the proposal.

The effort to build a U.S.-run alternative would re-create systems such as laboratories, data-sharing networks and rapid-response systems the U.S. abandoned when it announced its withdrawal from the WHO last year and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations.

While President Donald Trump accused the WHO of demanding “unfairly onerous payments,” the alternative his administration is considering carries a price tag about three times what the U.S. contributed annually to the U.N. health agency. The U.S. would build on bilateral agreements with countries and expand the presence of its health agencies to dozens of additional nations, the officials said.

“This $2 billion in funding to HHS is to build the systems and capacities to do what the WHO did for us,” one official said.

The Department of Health and Human Services has been leading the efforts and requested the funding from the Office of Management and Budget in recent weeks as part of a broader push to construct a U.S.-led rival to the WHO, officials said. Before withdrawing from the agency, the U.S. provided roughly $680 million a year in assessed dues and voluntary contributions to the WHO, often exceeding the combined contributions of other member states, according to HHS. Citing figures in the proposal, officials said the U.S. contributions represented about 15 to 18 percent of the WHO’s total annual funding of about $3.7 billion.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon did not answer detailed questions about the proposed WHO replacement but said the agency “is working with the White House in a deliberative, interagency process on the path forward for global health and foreign assistance that first and foremost protects Americans.” A spokeswoman for OMB declined to comment.

Public health experts said the effort would be costly and unlikely to match the WHO’s reach.

“Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who served as a senior covid-19 adviser during the Biden administration. “We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere the influence we had.”

Rather than attempting to rebuild with “something not constructable,” Inglesby said, the administration should specify what reforms it seeks and reengage with the agency.

In a statement issued last month when the withdrawal became official, HHS said the U.S. would “continue its global health leadership” through direct engagement with countries, the private sector and nongovernmental organizations, prioritizing emergency response, biosecurity coordination and health innovation.

Atul Gawande, a Harvard Medical School professor who served as USAID’s assistant administrator for global health from 2022 to 2025, said the proposal follows deep cuts that have already had consequences.

“It’s after the decimation of foreign aid for health, including the dismantling of USAID, and has already cost upward of three-quarters of a million lives,” Gawande said, citing data from a 2025 Lancet study and modeling from Boston University estimating the toll of dismantling USAID. “This is not reversing the damage. It is spending more than we spent on WHO to create an institution that’s unlikely to survive and will certainly accomplish only a fraction of what we did by working together with the entire world.”

The WHO, he added, provides “global access we do not have,” including to countries such as China and Russia that do not routinely share health data directly with the United States.

Trump announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the WHO at the start of his second term, citing what he called the agency’s “mishandling” of the coronavirus pandemic, failure to adopt reforms and inappropriate political influence from some members. In his executive order, Trump also criticized the WHO for continuing “to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments.”

The WHO did not immediately return a request for comment on the new U.S. proposal. The agency said last month that the U.S. withdrawal was “a decision that makes both the United States and the world less safe.”

The departure stunned global health experts and international authorities because the U.S. had been the most influential member of the nearly 200-member organization and played a key role in its establishment in 1948. It had also historically been the organization’s largest financial contributor.

Experts and medical societies have said withdrawing from the preeminent global health alliance is scientifically reckless because global cooperation is key to controlling and preventing infectious diseases. They said exiting the WHO makes the U.S. less prepared to respond to health emergencies such as the coronavirus pandemic or the West African Ebola crisis from 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people in the largest outbreak of the deadly disease since the virus was discovered in 1976.

Outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fevers — including Ebola, Marburg virus, Lassa fever and yellow fever — have quadrupled since the mid-1990s, according to figures cited in the proposal for a U.S. alternative to the WHO. Another pandemic on the scale of the coronavirus could incur economic costs of an estimated $375 billion a month, according to figures cited in the proposal.

Whether the federal government can build a worldwide disease-monitoring system comparable to the WHO — and how long it would take — remains uncertain.

Democratic leaders in California, Illinois, New York, Wisconsin and New York City have announced they are joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, an international system that detects and responds to emerging health threats.

Public health and infectious-disease experts have long said stopping diseases at their source is cheaper than emergency responses in the United States.

During a briefing last month with reporters, a senior HHS official said U.S.-led global health efforts going forward will rely on the presence that federal health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, already have in 63 countries and bilateral agreements with “hundreds of countries.”

“I just want to stress the point that we are not withdrawing from being a leader on global health,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules for the briefing.

The new initiative envisions expanding that footprint to more than 130 countries, according to the officials briefed on the proposal. But it comes as global health expertise in federal government under the Trump administration has been depleted by repeated layoffs, deferred resignations and retirements.

The U.S. is also still determining how it will participate in select WHO technical meetings, including the influenza strain-selection session later this month that informs the composition of the annual flu vaccine.

Jeff Stein contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... -proposal/

[ti-amie]

Mike Luckovich‬
‪@mluckovich.bsky.social‬
· 1h

[ti-amie]

[Owendonovan]

I hope he learned his lesson about hanging with a KNOWN felon who has sexually abused women and likely girls and hung out with pedophiles.
This should be a cautionary tale to other teams, but it won't reach them all.

Brady Tkachuk miffed over White House AI-doctored video

Brady Tkachuk, the Ottawa Senators captain and a Team USA gold medalist, said he didn't appreciate the AI-doctored video released by the White House that made it appear he was disparaging Canadians.

The video, published Sunday by the White House's official TikTok account, featured doctored footage from a Tkachuk brothers' news conference at the 4 Nations Face-Off last February. While "Free Bird," the goal song for Team USA, played in the background of the video, Brady Tkachuk was made to say, "They booed our national anthem, so I had to come out and teach those maple syrup eating f---s a lesson."

The clip, which discloses that it used AI-generated media, has 11.1 million views on TikTok and has been widely viewed on other social media platforms.

"Well, it's clearly fake, because it's not my voice, not my lips moving," Tkachuk said Thursday in his first media availability in Ottawa since the U.S. defeated Canada for the gold medal in men's Olympic ice hockey in Milan. "I'm not in control of any of those accounts. I know that those words would never come out of my mouth. So, I can't do anything about it."

Tkachuk was asked if he enjoyed the video.

"It's not my voice. It's not what I was saying," he said. "I would never say that. That's not who I am, so I guess I don't like that video because that would never come out of my mouth, and never had that thought."

Tkachuk also addressed what he didn't say during Team USA's locker room celebration. Some on social media accused Tkachuk of being the person who shouted, "Close the northern border!" during Team USA's congratulatory call with President Donald Trump.

"I've been seeing stuff that people think it's me. But if you watch the video, it's not my voice or something that I never say," Tkachuk said. "I don't know how that took a storm on its own when I give everything I have here.

"It's crazy when things go on social media, how fast they go. I would never say anything like that."

On that call, Trump made a widely circulated comment about the U.S. women's hockey team, which also won Olympic gold.

When Trump extended an invitation to the men's players to come to Washington for the State of the Union address, he said: "I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that," adding with a laugh that if he didn't also invite the women's team, "I do believe I probably would be impeached." Some players laughed along with the joke.

Team USA star Hilary Knight said Wednesday on "SportsCenter" that she thought it was a "distasteful" joke that "unfortunately is overshadowing" the success her team had in Milan. Boston Bruins goalie Jeremy Swayman, a member of Team USA, said Wednesday that "we should've reacted differently."

Like other American players, Tkachuk detailed a positive relationship between the men's and women's teams in the Olympics, from attending each other's games to hanging out at 3 a.m. in the Olympic Village café after the men returned as champions.

Tkachuk said he understood why women's players could feel insulted by that comment.

"I mean, I get it," he said. "We support them, they support us. You can't control what other people say. It was fun being around them, seeing how they play and the excellence around them.

"If I see one of them, we'll talk about the excitement of what we can control, which is to be gold medalists."

As for why the men's team laughed at Trump's comment, Tkachuk said the players were "caught off guard" a little bit.

"I don't really have an answer. It's a whirlwind of a moment," he said. "You can't control what somebody says. I guess got caught off guard a little bit. You're talking to the president 10 minutes after you achieve your dream."

Brady Tkachuk is one of five Team USA players whose NHL clubs are based in Canada. He partied in Miami with his teammates and then attended the State of the Union Address in Washington before returning to Ottawa.

"It was special," he said. "Being an American citizen, you never really think you're going to see the White House and be in the Oval Office."

But Tkachuk noted the awkwardness of helping the U.S. defeat Canada for the gold medal while being the captain for a team in Canada's capital, a position he has held the past five seasons in Ottawa.

"It's just such a passionate fan base," he said. "I said this after 4 Nations: It's a unique feeling when every single day the support from this fan base and then for three weeks they're not cheering for you. It's a crazy feeling.

"I've given absolutely everything I have as an Ottawa Senator. When you represent the U.S., it's about being an American. It's an honor. There's only three teams that ever won the gold medal. I wanted to achieve my childhood dream and bring a gold medal back to the U.S."

https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/480 ... ored-video

[ponchi101]

I hope he learned his lesson about hanging with a KNOWN felon who has sexually abused women and likely girls and hung out with pedophiles.
This should be a cautionary tale to other teams, but it won't reach them all.

...

https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/480 ... ored-video

As much of a vermin as Tiny is, for some reason, he does have that ability to attract people. It is incredible that they don't see that if you approach him, something will happen.