On January 22, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a joint statement on the “Termination of U.S. Membership in the World Health Organization.” The U.S. pull-out, at the initiation of Kennedy and President Trump, will have a tremendous effect on the funding level available to WHO. At its height, during the organization’s 2022-2023 two-year budget, the U.S. contributed $1.1 billion; for the upcoming 2026-2027 two year budget, the U.S. will contribute nothing.
With that funding, the U.S. supported many of the WHO’s crucial programs, especially for nations in the Global South, including emergency responses to global health crises and pandemics (including COVID-19) and vaccine distribution; Disease Control & Elimination, including international programs aimed at fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, polio, malaria, and tropical diseases; Strengthening Health Systems, including helping build stronger health infrastructure.
One of the sectors that the U.S. funds were focused on is eradicating polio, which the withdrawal of U.S. funding will devastate: Since 1988, the U.S. government has been the second-largest historical donor to global polio eradication efforts, contributing over $4.5 billion to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).
A key reason for the U.S. withdrawal from funding anti-polio efforts, is Kennedy’s fanatical New Age hatred of the polio vaccine. RFK, Jr. stated on the Lex Fridman talk show on July 6, 2023, that since the first polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, the anti-polio vaccine caused an “explosion” of cancers that “killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” This is insane. In 1955, Dr Jonas Salk developed the first injected vaccine against polio; in 1961, Dr Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine against polio (OPV), which became the vaccine of choice. Before the vaccine was developed in the 1950s, worldwide there were more than half a million cases a year of polio paralysis or death; that has gone down to 6 in 2021, and even less today. In the U.S., just take the year 1952: The anti-polio vaccine reduced the number of new polio cases, at 58,000, the number of polio paralytic individuals, at 21,269, and the number of polio deaths, at 3,145, just for the year 1952, all the way steeply down to zero today. That is the evidence.
However, a speaker at and leading proponent of the Kennedy-founded and -directed Children’s Defense Fund, Dr. Suzanne Humphries posted on X on March 1, 2024, that “One of the reasons the polio vaccine doesn’t work is because polio isn’t caused by an infectious virus. It’s caused by toxins.” Polio is caused by a virus, Poliovirus (PV), which has three types. But this toxin theory of disease is extreme New Age, and Kennedy fully endorses it. The way the New Age “deals” with “toxins” is enemas, purges, and dietary supplements.
The withdrawal of U.S. anti-polio vaccine funds, because of anti-science hysteria, could lead to the build-up of polio again in the Global South. Kennedy’s program is not only irrational; it is objectively pro-genocidal, and represents the outlook of the Death Lobby.
