A campaign group set up to challenge the World Health Organization is extending its operations across the Atlantic, adding US-based members to its board as it seeks to build a transatlantic coalition critical of the UN health agency, the Guardian reported.
The group and its expansion
Action on World Health (AWH) was co-founded in 2024 by Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, who serves as its honorary chairman. The group's stated ambition is far-reaching: not merely to reform the WHO but, in its own words, to see it replaced by a new body outside the United Nations system. Its move into the US follows Washington's withdrawal from the WHO at the start of 2026, a decision AWH had backed.
What the campaigners argue
AWH contends that the WHO has drifted from advising governments toward trying to direct them, and that decisions affecting national health policy should rest with elected national authorities rather than international officials. The group objects in particular to the WHO's Pandemic Agreement and to proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, arguing they could let an unaccountable body shape domestic responses to future outbreaks. It also campaigns for greater transparency over who funds international health bodies. In late 2024 it launched a review, led by a former WHO medical officer, tasked with recommending either deep reform of the organization or its replacement.
What the WHO and critics say
The WHO rejects the central claim that its pandemic accord overrides national sovereignty. The agreement, adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2025 by 124 votes to none with 11 abstentions, states explicitly that nothing in it gives the WHO authority to direct national law or policy, or to mandate lockdowns, vaccination or travel bans. Independent fact-checkers have similarly noted that successive drafts reaffirmed national authority.
AWH has also faced scrutiny over its backing. An investigation by the Good Law Project and the Guardian reported that the group's co-founder and chief executive, David Roach, is a lobbyist for the nicotine and vaping industry, and that AWH has declined to disclose its donors. Roach has said the group is "not currently" funded by vaping companies. Transparency campaigners argue that politically motivated lobbying should be as openly declared as commercial advertising.
A wider climate of WHO skepticism
AWH is operating amid rising institutional skepticism of the WHO in parts of the West. The United States formally left the organization in January 2026, and US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been sharply critical of the Pandemic Agreement. Supporters of the WHO counter that a coordinated global body is essential to detecting and containing outbreaks that do not respect borders — as the current Ebola emergency in Central Africa illustrates.
Whether AWH's US expansion translates into real political or legislative influence in Washington is, for now, an open question. What is clear is that a debate once confined to the WHO's member states is increasingly being fought in national capitals on both sides of the Atlantic.
