Argentinian President Javier Milei made two big announcements on Wednesday: to have his country withdraw from the World Health Organization and to ban hormone therapy for minors in his country.
Milei, who attended President Donald Trump‘s inauguration and has been a staunch ally of the newly elected president, said his country is withdrawing from the WHO over “profound differences” with its mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic.
ARGENTINA WITHDRAWS FROM THE WHO Presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni@madorni
announces Argentina's withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) "This is due to the profound differences in health management, especially regarding the…— In Milei We trust (@InMilei) February 5, 2025
“This is due to the profound differences in health management, especially regarding the pandemic, where together with the government of Alberto Fernandez, they led us to the longest confinement in the history of humanity and to the lack of independence from the political influence of some states,” Milei’s presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni said on Wednesday.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 21 to withdraw the United States from the WHO. He said the global health agency “ripped us off” with disproportionate “unfairly onerous payments” and mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic among other health concerns worldwide.
“We have decided to leave such a harmful organization, which was the executing arm of what was the largest social-control experiment in history,” Milei said on Instagram.
Gabriel Solano, a former vice presidential candidate and an Argentine political activist and president of the Workers’ Party, criticized Milei on social media: “With the departure of the WHO, Milei becomes a total Trump stooge. And beware, he is part of an offensive against public health.”
Argentina’s move to ban hormone therapy and gender surgery for minors and restrict trans women in women’s prisons mirrors Trump’s executive orders in recent weeks. Trump ordered on his first day in office to halt federal support for gender transitions for transgender people under age 19.
Milei’s administration said that it will amend Argentina’s gender identity law to “prohibit hormone treatments and body adaptation surgeries for minors under 18 years of age.”
“Gender ideology taken to the extreme and applied to children by force or psychological coercion simply constitutes child abuse,” Milei said in a statement. “Children do not have the cognitive maturity to make decisions about irreversible processes.”
Last February, Milei had ended the Argentine government’s use of “inclusive language.” LGBT activists had created gender-neutral endings to Spanish words that grammatically always had nouns with a specific gender ending, such as an “-o” ending to represent masculine nouns and an “-a” ending for a feminine noun.
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During the World Economic Forum in January, Milei called out the LGBT agenda.
“This forum defends men who dress as women even if they abuse minors. All the lies and progressive madness are over, the world needed a leader who would step forward in the cultural struggle. Do you support these words?” Milei said.
