U.S. health agencies joined WHO's flu meeting despite Trump's plan to pull out

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention American and Food and Drug Administration participated in a meeting of the World Health Organization to discuss the composition of flu vaccines, an official of the United Nations Agency said on Friday.

President Donald Trump began the 12-month-old withdrawal process for the United States to leave the WHO on his first day of mandate in January and has also been supervised a dismantling of American foreign aid that has struck health programs worldwide.

“We hope that the break in the work that we do with the United States is temporary and we hope that we can resume this in full strength in the coming weeks,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of the Department of Preparation and Prevention of the Pandemic and the Pandemic to Who.

“There is information that comes out of the American department of agriculture on the animal side, so I want to be very clear that the United States still contributes,” said Kerkhove.

The comments occurred on the sidelines of an event where WHO announced its recommendations for the composition of flu vaccines for 2025-2026 in the northern hemisphere.

The World Health Organization has recommended that vaccines include H3N2 updates stumps, reflecting the recommended composition for the southern hemisphere.

He also recommended that zoonotic vaccines include two additional strains of bird flu virus virus, partly in response to a human case detected last year in Australia.

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Despite its broader withdrawal from WHO, the United States has not moved to leave the Panamérican Health Organization (PAHO), the specialized health agency for the Americas and the WHO Regional Office for the Americas.

However, disruptions were reported during regulatory meetings related to vaccines in the United States after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the post of head of the Ministry of Health and Social Services at the beginning of the month.