The MeidasTouch Podcast
Meidas Health, Episode 4: Why Trump’s WHO Exit Puts Us All at Risk (Dr. Van Kerkhove)
17 Apr 2025
America First or America Alone? The Trump Administration's decision to pull out of the World Health Organization might seem on brand—but is it? Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, senior leader at WHO, joins Meidas Health host Dr. Vin Gupta to discuss the very real ways a full-scale withdrawal impacts every American, both visibly and behind the scenes. It’s a can’t-miss, honest discussion on why the WHO matters to all of us—and how it is reforming in response to the scrutiny it has received in the wake of COVID-19. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Hello, everybody. Great to be with you. On episode four, we are lucky to be joined by a senior leader at the World Health Organization, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove. And I'm glad she's here because there's a lot that we need to talk about. We actually did some media last week for broadcast TV. And the fact is, you can't talk about much in five minutes. And so Maria is going to join us.
And we're going to dive deeper into why the WHO matters to every single American across the country. It's an organization that does a lot for us, often behind the scenes, and often we don't really have enough time to talk about that. So that's why she's going to join us. Before she joins us, I just want to give you a sense of what we're trying to do here. This is episode four of a new podcast.
health-focused podcast on all things healthcare and public health. We know we have a wide audience, all of you. We know that we want to be respectful and time-efficient since all your lives are very, very busy. And we want to make sure that we're doing something new here, not just redundant.
which is why the caliber of guests and the entities that they represent is a signal for what this represents. We just had for episode two, Dr. Bob Califf, the recent former FDA commissioner. He's a good friend and mentor. And we talked about the role of misinformation in our current just healthcare landscape and the work that he did at FDA to try to combat that.
And really to keep up this momentum and to show you that your time is worth listening to this podcast. We're going to keep up the high caliber of guests and the entities that they represent here with Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove. Dr. Van Kerkhove, great to see you. Maria, I'm going to refer to you as Maria, if that's okay.
Please, no problem.
Well, Maria, thank you for joining us. And as a tee-up, I'd love to, if you could just give us the audience a little bit about your background at WHO and what your works looked like over the last, especially during the pandemic.
Well, thanks for having me, and I appreciate the time to have a chance to chat. I love podcasts, I have to say. I feel like it's the greatest opportunity to have a discussion and really not be forced to get them in these tiny little segments. But I'm Maria Van Kerkhove. I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist here at WHO. I sit in headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
We are an organization of thousands of individuals, 6,000, 7,000 individuals worldwide. We work in regions and in countries in more than 150 countries. And the job that we do here and the job that I'm responsible for is to promote, provide, protect health.
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