Trump Halts US Funding for World Health Organization

The US has said it will suspend funding to the World Health Organization while it reviews the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday, saying the international health agency made mistakes that “caused so much death” as the coronavirus spread across the globe.

He said the administration will conduct a “thorough” investigation that should last 60 to 90 days.

“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 at a White House press conference.

Trump criticized the international agency’s response to the outbreak, saying “one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations” that Trump imposed early on in the outbreak.

“Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China, saving untold numbers of lives,” he said.

“This is an evaluation period, but in the meantime, we’re putting a hold on all funds going to World Health. We’ll be able to take that money and channel it to the areas that most need it,” he added. 

In a statement, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that now is not the time to reduce resources in the fight against COVID-19.

He said there will come a time after the epidemic is over, to look back and understand how the disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly, “but now is not that time.”

“It is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus,” Guterres said.

The coronavirus, which emerged in Wuhan, China over three months ago, has infected more than 1.9 million people worldwide and killed at least 125,678 as of Tuesday night.

Trump had first threatened last week to withhold funds 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.”

“The WHO willingly took China’s assurances at face value and defended the actions of the Chinese government even while praising it for its so-called transparency,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Source: cnbc.com