by WorldTribune Staff, February 19, 2026 Real World News

In the wake of its disastrous response to the Covid outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) saw the Trump Administration withdraw the U.S.’s nearly $1 billion in funding.

SafeBlood recently released an update which shows four of the top five current funders of the WHO are private entities.

“With the U.S. out, the WHO’s largest financial backers are no longer sovereign governments. The top two funders now are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the GAVI the Vaccine Alliance, followed by the European Commission, the UK, and the World Bank. (The controlling funders and interests of GAVI the Vaccine Alliance are, the WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.),” R. Clinton Ohlers, vice president of SafeBlood, wrote in a Feb. 19 Substack analysis.

“We may now expect the WHO to reflect the priories of these private entities even more aggressively than before. The good news is that the U.S. just removed 14% of the WHO budget and will not be bound by WHO decisions.”

“These private entities are also vaccine funders,” Ohlers added.

While Bill Gates’s foundation tops the current list of WHO donors, it also contributes heavily to GAVI, giving the Microsoft co-founder hefty sway over the WHO.

GAVI, critics argue, favors industry interests over strengthening local health. It said to grant excessive influence to private donors and vaccine manufacturers on its board.

Healthy and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the withdrawal of U.S. funding for GAVI on June 25, 2025.

“The less than good news is that in spite of RFK Jr.’s withdrawing all U.S. funding from GAVI in 2025, the House passed HR 7006 on January 14, eight days ahead of the U.S. exit from the WHO,” Ohlers noted. “The bill allocates over $3.5 billion for global disease outbreaks and preparedness, and it sidesteps HHS with a $300 million contribution to GAVI. The bill awaits passage in the Senate.”

Ohlers continued: “While funds may be redirected away from the WHO, large-scale investments in pandemic preparedness and vaccine infrastructure remain robust. The U.S. withdrawal from the WHO is therefore symbolically significant. It signals dissatisfaction with centralized global health governance. It reflects an assertion of national autonomy.”

SafeBlood, has members in over fifty-five countries around the world, “may expect that whatever restraining influence the U.S. previously had, if any, in the WHO is now completely absent. In the immediate and medium-term future, we expect centralized health policy in the EU and Asia to reflect the priorities of these private entities rather than scientific reality and transparency,” Ohlers wrote.

The U.S. withdrawal “lessens the power of the WHO, but does not resolve these deeper concerns.”

Ohlers continued:

Since 2024, there has been increasingly open recognition of the misguided nature of the COVID-19 responses, with WHO guidance, from lockdown policy, to emergency regulatory frameworks worldwide, to the harms of the vaccine rollout, all of which appear more aligned with vaccine-funder interest than genuine public health.

Even the question of directed blood donations was indirectly affected by this global policy climate. After 2020, regulatory bodies increasingly relied on broad assurances that mRNA vaccines posed no transfusion-related concerns, despite emerging scientific literature documenting circulating spike protein and vaccine-related components in some recipients (Ogata et al., Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2022; Bansal et al., Journal of Immunology, 2021).

With this climate of influence now persisting, SafeBlood will be as vigilant as ever to track how the new distribution of influence at the WHO affects our worldwide members in our fight for health freedom.

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  GAVI vaccine group, top funders of WHO are Gates Foundation, With U.S. out, WorldTribune.com