Two Govts Exit WHO & Call It Sovereignty. Pandemic Treaty Is Near Dead

Yesterday, Argentina formally completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, making it the second major nation in two months to sever ties with the institution that spent the last five years pretending to be the arbiter of what goes into your body, your children’s bodies, and your government’s policy decisions.

Foreign Affairs Minister Pablo Quirno confirmed the exit on March 17th, exactly one year after Argentina filed its formal notice — as required under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties — and the statement his government issued deserves to be read carefully: Argentina would now pursue health cooperation through “bilateral agreements and regional forums, fully safeguarding its sovereignty and its capacity to make decisions regarding health policies.”

That sentence is a direct repudiation of everything WHO has tried to build since 2020.

Javier Milei’s government cited “profound differences in health management” — and in case anyone missed the subtext, presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni was more specific when the withdrawal was first announced: Argentina objected to WHO guidance that produced, in their words, the longest confinement in the history of humanity. That’s not a diplomatic turn of phrase. That’s an accusation. And it’s one that we at Interest of Justice have been making in constitutional courts in Costa Rica for four years.

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The United States walked out the same door on January 22nd, with RFK Jr. and Marco Rubio signing a joint statement calling WHO “bloated and inefficient” and pointing to “bureaucratic inertia, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international politics” as the reasons.

What replaced it — at least according to Washington — is the America First Global Health Strategy, a series of direct bilateral Memorandums of Understanding with countries that previously received US global health assistance. Five-year plans, 2026–2030, country by country, cutting out the Geneva middleman entirely. The US also, in a separate January 7th (ER: 1 + 7 / 17?) executive order, announced withdrawal from 66 international organizations — 31 of them inside the UN system — in what one analyst described as a crystallization of the view that international cooperation is only acceptable “on Washington’s own terms.”

You can disagree with how Washington frames that position while still recognizing what it means structurally, that the post-WWII model of pooled global health governance, where a small group of institutions in Geneva set the agenda for 194 nations’ health policies, is dissolving. And the timing is not incidental.

Here’s what most coverage isn’t connecting: the WHO Pandemic Agreement, which passed the World Health Assembly in May 2025 after four years of negotiations and enormous pressure — negotiations we participated in, were censored during, and have been fighting since the first public hearing in 2022 — cannot actually take effect until member states finalize the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex.

The deadline for that annex is the May 2026 World Health Assembly. With only twelve negotiating days left before that deadline, the gap between blocs remains enormous: a coalition of roughly 100 low-and-middle income countries is demanding mandatory benefit-sharing guarantees, while high-income countries and their pharmaceutical industries are protecting patent ecosystems and open access to sequence data.

We have been covering and fighting PABS since the beginning — and Dr. Michael Yeadon said it plainly, agreeing that there is no more important or urgent cause than stopping what this framework is designed to institutionalize. Its so important folks.

What this means is that the treaty WHO announced with great fanfare as proof that “multilateralism is alive and well” is, at this moment, a legal instrument frozen in time, with no ratification pathway open, and the two countries that were its largest funders and most influential members now gone. Without the PABS annex, there are no signatures. Without sixty ratifications, there is no entry into force. And without the United States, the pharmaceutical industry’s cooperation with any pathogen-sharing framework becomes, in the words of one Geneva-based legal scholar, theoretically possible through private contract but “legally complicated.” It’s a great sign of more huge wins for the LIGHT.

ER: Just our two cents, but we strongly doubt that Guterres, Tedros and Gates are free to say anything to anyone right now. 

Meanwhile, the WHO itself is cutting 1,200 jobs — a 22 percent reduction from its January 2025 workforce — after losing roughly $500 million in salary coverage when US funding evaporated. Tedros has been telling anyone who will listen that the organization has “no choice.” The parent body, the UN itself, is facing what Secretary-General António Guterres described in a letter to all member states as “imminent financial collapse,” warning that the UN could run out of cash by July 2026 if contributions don’t materialize. As of early February, only 55 countries had paid their annual assessments by the due date. And the US walked away from an estimated $260–280 million in unpaid WHO obligations with no legal mechanism available to force repayment. Gates and his buddies of course stepped in to fill up the coffers of WHO but its not enough without the biggest funder USA gone…

What’s interesting about Argentina’s position — and what mainstream coverage is treating as a nuance but we think is the real story — is that Argentina stayed in PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization, WHO’s regional affiliate for the Americas, which operates semi-autonomously with its own budget and decision structure. This is the same escape hatch the United States leaves open for bilateral and regional cooperation. The model that’s emerging isn’t isolationism. It’s a deliberate disaggregation of global health governance into regional and bilateral frameworks where national governments retain control over the terms of engagement rather than delegating that authority to a Geneva secretariat accountable to no electorate on earth.

For the record, PAHO are the same ones who refused to answer court orders in our cases about which covid vaccines were imported as experimental/investigational, and hid Indigenous propaganda from the court. PAHO is WHO for Central and South America, for those who don’t know.

Argentina’s ambassador Carlos Mario Foradori told the WHO Executive Board in February that his country would continue to comply with International Health Regulations for disease outbreak reporting and that “we will not be isolated from the world.” What he was really saying is: we will cooperate on terms we negotiate, not on terms handed down by an organization whose COVID-era performance included, among other documented failures, coordinating messaging lockstep with member-state governments that were simultaneously running mRNA product rollouts under emergency use frameworks that bypassed normal authorization, and resisting any independent accounting of what actually happened in the GLOBAL EXPERIMENT.

We have been in constitutional court in Costa Rica over exactly this question since 2020. Our government’s own admissions, extracted through five successful Constitutional Chamber victories, confirmed that COVID products were imported under Article 117 as investigational biomedical research materials — not as vaccines in any legally recognized sense. The same authority chain we challenged domestically is the one that connected WHO emergency declarations to FDA Emergency Use Authorizations to DOD contracting to the products that ended up in arms around the world. FDA’s own gene therapy guidance — issued just days before the US WHO withdrawal — confirmed in its own regulatory language what Moderna had been telling the SEC for years: mRNA products that “mediate their effects by transcription or translation of transferred genetic material” are, by the FDA’s own definition, gene therapy. The fraud cascaded globally through a chain of authority that is now visibly breaking apart. We are taking FDA and HHS and DOD to federal district court over it. And we filed citizen petitions while FDA was simultaneously demanding pharma prove flu vaccines work while refusing to answer whether mRNA products are gene therapy — the same agency, the same definitions, the same deliberate silence.

Sasha Latypova and Dr. Michael Yeadon, both of whom have contributed expert declarations in our own proceedings and testified at our private Nuremberg Hearing in November 2024 before Costa Rica’s Vice President and Health Minister, have documented the manufacturing and regulatory side of this story in exhaustive detail. FDA ultimately confirmed what they testified to: children died from vaccine-induced myocarditis in the 7–16 age range, exactly the age groups we fought to protect through Costa Rican litigation when the government began pushing injections for children. The Amsterdam Court of Appeals case, which we covered in detail on March 9th, is pursuing the same thread through Dutch jurisdiction — with Bill Gates, Albert Bourla, and former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte named as defendants, and a ruling on whether expert witnesses will be permitted to testify scheduled for April 9th. If that ruling goes through, Sasha, Yeadon, Katherine Watt, Catherine Austin Fitts, and Dr. Joseph Sansone will formally testify in a pre-trial evidence hearing ahead of the main civil trial currently scheduled between May and October 2026. Gates and Bourla have already been ordered to appear in person.

The WHO Executive Board’s response to the Argentina withdrawal was described by international law scholar Gian Luca Burci of the Geneva Graduate Institute as a “classical dichotomy between law and politics.” Most member states expressed regret but refused to argue against the exit, because — as Burci noted — “while today it’s Argentina, tomorrow it can be me.” That sentence is doing enormous work. It means the exits have created a legal and political precedent, and other governments are watching carefully, hedging their positions, leaving their options open. Costa Rica’s delegate was among those who expressed regret. We have been working directly with Costa Rica’s delegates at the highest levels for years — including the moment in 2024 when Costa Rica became the only country to formally disassociate from the WHO Pandemic Treaty extension consensus at WHA77. We note the regret expressed now for the record.

What this moment represents is not a triumph of any particular political ideology. Milei and Trump come from very different traditions and have made plenty of decisions we’d challenge in other domains. What it represents is something more structural: the institutions that were built to manage global health in the post-war era, and that were accelerated and weaponized during COVID as tools of pharmaceutical market capture and population-level behavioral control, are losing the consent of the governed. Not because of conspiracy theories. Because their performance is on the public record, their financial dependencies are documented, and their legal frameworks are being challenged in courts from San José to Amsterdam to — soon — jurisdictions that haven’t yet made the news.

The WHO was never a neutral body. It is an institution 80 percent funded by voluntary contributions — meaning earmarked donations from member states, pharmaceutical companies, foundations, and private sector actors who attach conditions to how that money is spent. The UN-WEF Strategic Partnership Framework, signed in 2019 — nine months before anyone had heard of COVID-19 — handed the global response coordination to a public-private stakeholder model that cut democratic accountability out of the chain entirely. We have been naming this architecture since 2022 and building legal records against it in every venue available to us.

We don’t know yet what replaces the WHO-centered model. Bilateral frameworks can be better or worse than multilateral ones depending entirely on who holds the leverage in each negotiation. The US bilateral MOUs are five-year plans designed partly to transition countries away from aid dependency, but also to lock in American terms where Geneva’s terms used to apply. That’s a different concentration of power, not an absence of it. The PABS negotiations, if they ever conclude, will determine whether the next pandemic sees pathogens shared transparently or hoarded behind proprietary sequence databases controlled by the same industry that spent 2020–2022 writing its own regulatory rules. The Ninth Circuit’s 2024 ruling that mRNA injections are a treatment, not a vaccine, and therefore not a legitimate state interest is exactly the kind of precedent that makes those future negotiations harder to rig.

What we do know is that the window for accountability — real accountability, not institutional hand-wringing — has never been wider. Governments that stood with WHO through COVID are watching two major members walk out with explicit indictments of WHO’s pandemic performance. Constitutional courts, appeals courts, and international legal bodies are hearing the evidence that health officials spent years insisting didn’t exist. The expert witnesses who were deplatformed, defunded, and professionally destroyed for raising questions are now providing declarations in proceedings advancing through formal legal systems. Interest of Justice participated in both WHO pandemic treaty public hearings, received the same official INB communications as Member States, was censored by WHO at the first-ever civil society consultation in the organization’s history, and has been building the legal record of that censorship ever since. We filed with a 10-business-day deadline to respond back in 2022. We helped send 50,000 legal demands that stopped the first round of IHR amendments that same year. We got into the HHS OGA stakeholder session and said it to their faces. We are still here. We are still filing.

Argentina left the WHO yesterday. The United States left in January. The UN Secretary-General is warning about financial collapse by July. The pandemic treaty is frozen. And the PABS deadline — the last mechanism that could give WHO’s Pandemic Agreement any real operational meaning — is twelve negotiating days away from expiration with no consensus in sight.

Pay attention to what happens in Geneva in May.

This fight has been four years in the making. Every article below is part of the same thread — the same legal record, the same evidence, the same relentless building of a case that is now playing out in courts on three continents. If it matters to you, subscribe to our Substack and support us with a donation at interestofjustice.org/donate.

We are the real deal — no grants, no pharma money, no institutional backing. Just us, our readers, and the legal process including courts. Every filing has been funded by people like YOU who refused to look away. We cannot continue without you.

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