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Argentina’s Javier Milei has said he will pull his country out of the World Health Organization after the US announced its own exit last month, as the libertarian leader embraces the upheaval in international institutions triggered by US President Donald Trump.
Milei, who has courted friendships with Trump and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, was a critic of the UN global health body before becoming president and called the Covid-19 lockdowns it supported “a crime against humanity”.
“Argentines are not going to allow an international organisation to infringe our sovereignty, especially not over our health,” said Milei’s spokesperson Manuel Adorni on Wednesday as he announced the withdrawal.
Milei, who has implemented a sweeping austerity and deregulation drive to fix an economic crisis in Argentina, has offered himself as an important ally for Trump in what he calls their “shared fight against socialism”.
Milei boasted of “exporting [his] chainsaw model” to the US last year after Musk announced he would co-lead an advisory Department of Government Efficiency.
Even before Trump was elected to serve a second term, Milei had delivered speeches at the UN, the World Economic Forum and dozens of rightwing conferences in which he railed against what he said were “woke” values permeating international institutions.
Milei’s office on Wednesday said the WHO had “promoted endless quarantine measures without scientific backing [that] caused one of the greatest economic catastrophes in world history”.
“The international community must rethink the existence of these supranational bodies, which are financed by everyone, don’t meet their objectives [and] play international politics,” it added.
The WHO issued a range of health guidance during the pandemic, but decisions to impose lockdowns and other Covid-related policies were made by national governments.
Milei’s government has stoked concern it will pull Argentina out of other global forums, including the Paris agreement on climate change, which Trump also said he would exit last month.
Diplomats said a memo had circulated in Buenos Aires’ foreign ministry proposing the country leave the climate deal — which is signed by almost 200 nations and aims to limit global average temperature increases — though no final decision has been taken.
Climate experts have warned leaving the Paris agreement will endanger a trade deal that South American trade bloc Mercosur recently finished negotiating with the EU.
Adorni said Argentina “does not receive financial support from the WHO for health management” and the exit “would not affect [health] funding or the quality of services”.
But opposition figures said withdrawing could limit Argentina’s access to information-sharing and vaccination co-ordination programmes.
“Argentina is a country that gets a lot more from the WHO than it gives,” Pablo Yedlin, a leftwing lawmaker and head of the congressional public health commission, told newspaper La Nación. “In a globalised world . . . when we have a pandemic we need the [information] sharing these organisms provide.”
Trump had also accused the WHO of mishandling international health crises including the pandemic, and of demanding “unfairly onerous” payments from the US, its biggest funder.
Trump started the year-long process to pull the US out of the WHO during his first term in 2020, but Joe Biden reversed the decision on taking office in January 2021. Trump reissued the notice to quit the global health body within hours of his second presidential inauguration last month.
The WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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