The President of the United States Donald Trump has instructed his administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while evaluating the agency’s “role in severely mismanaging” the coronavirus pandemic. The President announced this Tuesday in his white house breifing.
“Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” Trump said.
Trump has cosistently accused WHO of mismanaging the outbreak through it’s initial reaponse. Trump said that “one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.”
“Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China saving untold numbers of lives,” he said.
He continued by saying that, “The WHO willingly took China’s assurances at face value, and they willingly took it at face value and defended the actions of the Chinese government event praising China for its so-called transparency,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
By this instruction, Trump has held through to his last week threat to withdraw US funding from WHO, saying it pushed back on his travel ban from China early in the Covid-19 outbreak. He claimed Tuesday that WHO “pushed China’s misinformation” about the virus, saying it “wasn’t communicable and there was no need for travel bans.”
While WHO is yet to offer a concrete defence against this accusation its response last week, was to urge leaders not to politicize the outbreak. “If you don’t want to have many more body bags.”
“At the end of the day, the people belong to all political parties. The focus of all political parties should be to save their people, please do not politicize this virus,” Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a an address on April 8. He made an appeal for unity across the globe, saying the virus will exploit cracks in political parties, religious groups or between different nations to spread even more widely. “If you want to be exploited and if you want to have many more body bags, then you do it. If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it,” he said.
Trump’s attack on WHO may not totally be baseless as a top official of the international agency submitted Monday that she suspected early that the virus could be transmited human-to-human. This didn’t reflect WHO’s earlier information on the virus rather they followed what is now termed “China’s lies and attempt to cover the true nature.”
