One Day After U.S. Exits WHO, California Joins International WHO Network
California wasted no time making its loyalties clear.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that California will be the first state to join a World Health Organization network. The announcement, which came the day after the U.S. formally withdrew from the WHO, is the latest of California’s actions to reject changes in national public health policy.
California last week became the first U.S. state to formally join a World Health Organization (WHO)-coordinated international health network.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the move one day after the U.S. finalized its withdrawal from the WHO. President Donald Trump initiated the withdrawal last year, via an executive order he signed on Jan. 20, 2025, his first day in office.
The order said the U.S. was leaving the WHO because of how the organization handled the COVID-19 pandemic. The order also cited the WHO’s “failure to adopt urgently needed reforms” and its “inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”
Newsom framed his decision to join the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) as opposition to Trump’s order, and as a necessary safeguard against emerging health threats.
Newsom said the federal government’s withdrawal from the WHO has left a dangerous gap in global cooperation.
“Countering Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, California is the first American state to join the @WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert & Response Network,” Newsom wrote on X.
“California will not bear witness to the chaos this decision will bring,” Newsom said in his press release, calling the federal pullout “reckless” and warning it would undermine public health protections nationwide.
Emily G. Hilliard, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), told The Defender that California’s announcement doesn’t affect U.S. policy.
Hilliard said the U.S. is charting its own course on global health engagement, “grounded in accountability, transparency, and the expertise of America’s public health institutions.”
“States do not set U.S. foreign policy, and unilateral actions by individual governors that failed their own people during the pandemic do not alter this administration’s assessment of WHO’s failures or our commitment to putting the health of the American people first,” she said.
California health freedom attorney Rita Barnett-Rose told The Defender that Newsom’s announcement, made during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, “goes beyond political theater.”
“While he has no authority to bind Californians to WHO policies or conduct foreign policy on behalf of the state, framing alignment with a foreign organization as a ‘counterweight’ to federal policy raises serious questions about foreign-affairs preemption and public-health data sharing,” she said.
Announcement is Newsom’s latest move to oppose U.S. federal health policy
Newsom made the announcement after meeting with WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during his trip to the World Economic Forum.
Newsom said California will join GOARN, a WHO-coordinated system designed to detect and respond to international disease outbreaks.
GOARN connects governments, laboratories and health institutions globally to share data and mobilize rapid responses to outbreaks. By joining the network, California is positioning itself as an independent participant in international health coordination.
Politico said Newsom’s decision was the “latest move by the governor to cast California as a counterweight to the Trump administration’s health policy agenda.”
Since mid-2025, Newsom has been engaged in a broader effort to build a state-led public health coordination to circumvent changes made to public health policy at the federal level.
In September 2025, Newsom signed a law granting the state the authority to set its own vaccine guidance based on the recommendations of professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), rather than on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendations.
That same month, California joined Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in creating the West Coast Alliance, a public health partnership intended to issue its own immunization guidelines.
In October 2025, Newsom joined 14 other governors in launching the Governors Public Health Alliance, an initiative designed to coordinate their public health efforts independently of national public health agencies.
Members say the alliance — created in response to federal public health policy under the Trump administration — will take on work typically performed by federal institutions housed within HHS.
Last month, Newsom announced the launch of the Public Health Network Innovation Exchange, which will be advised by former CDC officials, including ousted former agency head Susan Monarez, Ph.D., and Dr. Debra Houry, who resigned when Monarez was fired.
And after HHS in January announced it was paring down the number of vaccines routinely recommended for children, California and at least 20 other states announced they would not follow the new CDC recommendations and instead would continue to follow the childhood vaccine schedule endorsed by the AAP.
Writing in the California Globe, Barnett-Rose said that decisions by California and other “coastal blue states” that are doubling down “on the very coercive model that failed so catastrophically during COVID — while insisting, with growing urgency, that they alone are ‘protecting science’” — are leading to a “collapse of medical legitimacy.”
She said that as the federal government moves to provide more individualized care and “patient autonomy,” California is “locking centralized authority into law while continuing to rely on financial incentives that leave parents little room for genuine consent.”
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