WHO Withdrawal, Bird Flu Updates and a Link between Fitness and Treatment Outcomes

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Executive orders that impact science and health in the U.S. came quickly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Tanya Lewis, senior editor of health and medicine, explains how grievances over COVID and funding led Trump to order the U.S.’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization—and what that withdrawal would mean for global health. Plus, we present an update on the spread of bird flu in the U.S. and other news on topics from animal behavior to astronomy. –Listen to our episode about the mishandled response to the bird flu outbreak –Read more about Trump’s executive orders around science and health –Check out some lighthearted animal behavior research E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest Tanya Lewis. Our show is edited by Madison Goldberg with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:29.8	Happy Monday listeners. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. Let's kick off
0:35.6	the week by catching up on some of the latest science news.
0:39.3	First, we've got a quick update from one of our Siam correspondents. On January 20th, President
0:44.5	Donald Trump signed an executive order stating his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the
0:49.0	World Health Organization, or WHO. Here to unpack that for us is Tanya Lewis, a senior editor covering health and medicine
0:55.8	at Scientific American. The World Health Organization is an agency of the United Nations. It was
1:02.1	founded in 1948, and it has nearly 200 member states. It has a pretty broad scope, from working
1:08.6	to expand health care access around the world to responding
1:11.4	to disease outbreaks and pandemics. So Trump issued an executive order that signaled that he
1:18.1	intends to withdraw from the WHO, but the full process actually takes a year. He tried to do this
1:23.4	during his last term, but Biden reversed it before it took effect.
1:31.8	Trump said he's withdrawing because he thinks the organization handled the COVID pandemic poorly,
1:35.7	and because he thinks the U.S. pays an unfair share of the agency's funding.
1:40.7	It's true that we do pay the most of any member country, but most of our contributions are actually voluntary and earmarked for specific projects.
1:44.5	The WTO is definitely not perfect. It did make some notable mistakes during the pandemic.
1:50.0	For example, the agency initially dismissed the possibility that the virus was airborne,
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