Secretive Trump Global Health Deals Undermine Cooperation, Infectious Disease Response, New Tracker Reveals
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump Administration’s divisive approach to negotiating health agreements with developing countries could undermine public health and efforts to combat infectious disease, according to a new Public Citizen tracker.
The tracker analyzes the nine publicly available U.S. agreements negotiated with African states to provide health aid under the so-called America First Global Health Strategy, for areas where countries negotiated changes to the Trump Administration’s proposed terms.
Key takeaways from the tracker include:
- Countries are not being held to the same standards or receiving comparable benefits;
- Country-by-country terms and definitions for global health security collaboration differ, which may introduce unnecessary burden and undermine regionally and globally coherent disease response;
- Variable and ill-defined process and outcome metrics undermine the ability to achieve ambitious health goals and complicates evaluation of the America First Global Health Strategy’s efficacy and impact;
- Variation in local manufacturing commitments and procurement approaches could undermine long-term regional market stability;
- Engagement with impacted communities and civil society experts, who were largely excluded from negotiations, is needed in the implementation phases of these agreements to produce well-informed and workable health programs.
The tracker also shows that countries that have negotiated and pushed for their preferred terms have succeeded in part, while others, perhaps particularly countries with less power and leverage, accepted proposed U.S. terms during the rushed negotiations.
“Our analysis shows that when countries stand up to the Trump administration, they are securing better terms for their people,” said Public Citizen Access to Medicines Director Peter Maybarduk. “Analyzing these agreements is essential to understanding what the Trump administration is building in place of the foreign aid programs it decimated. Congress ordered spending to support health and fight infectious disease. But our analysis suggests that the Trump administration’s standards for ensuring and measuring success are likely to fail – unless they change.”
Public Citizen makes available every health agreement text disclosed so far, including six new specimen sharing agreements published this week. Public Citizen called on the administration to immediately release the agreements to the public, along with the associated data and specimen agreements that lay out contentious data sharing obligations.
In April, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit, after the U.S. State Department failed to respond to its FOIA requests for copies of several of the health funding agreements.
The tracker was developed in collaboration with Emily Bass, author of the “To End A Plague: Again” Substack.