The Argentine Ministry of Health accused this Thursday the World Health Organization (WHO) to use the outbreak of hantavirus on the cruise MV Hondius to “condition a sovereign decision of the Argentina”, whose Government made its departure from the organization effective last March.
Argentina “does not need to belong to the OMS to work with other countries“, indicates an official statement distributed hours after the organization asked this country to USA to reconsider their decision to abandon it.
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“I think they will reconsider their decisions because they can see how important universality is for health security, since viruses don’t care about our politics, or our borders, or all the excuses we may have.“, the director general of the WHO had said shortly before, in a press conference, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The far-right government Javier Miley indicated that, given the cases of hantavirus reported in the MV Hondius -which set sail from the Argentine port of Ushuaia on April 1-, the Ministry of Health “maintains preventive epidemiological monitoring active, supports the exchange of information with other countries and works together with jurisdictions to reconstruct the path of the first cases”.
In the statement, Argentina assures that “has the health, technical and political capacity to protect the health of the population”, without cases of hantavirus associated with those of the outbreak on the cruise ship being identified in the country so far.
The Government “supports international cooperation when appropriate, including the technical link with the Pan American Health Organization at the regional level, without giving up the power to define their own health decisions”.
“This situation shows that technical cooperation does not require political subordination. The WHO once again puts politics before evidence and tries to use an extraordinary health event to condition a sovereign decision by Argentina,” the note from the Ministry of Health states.
The Government insisted that Argentina’s position “does not change” and “The international organizations financed by all, which supported ruinous health measures and never seriously reviewed their errors, should explain their failures before attempting to impose conditions on a sovereign country.”.
Argentina concluded the withdrawal procedure from the WHO on March 17, after the United States took the same step on January 22.
The Milei Government had announced in February 2025 its decision to withdraw from the WHO by arguing “deep differences” with the organization in the management of the pandemic covid-19.