On Tuesday, Donald Trump ceased funding to the specialized agency responsible for international public health and global health responses, in the middle of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
“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 during a press conference.
As he continued, Trump slammed the organization for its response and called into question the Chinese influence at the organization.
“Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death,” Trump said, emphasizing the nation’s “duty to insist on full accountability.
In response, the WHO expressed regret for the Celebrity-in-Chief’s decision but made it clear that they “alerted the world” to the deadly virus months ago, despite the fact that little was known about the deadly disease.
“In the first weeks of January, the WHO was very, very clear,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said. “We alerted the world on January 5th. Systems around the world, including the U.S., began to activate their incident management systems on January the 6th. And through the next number of weeks, we’ve produced multiple updates to countries, including briefing multiple governments, multiple sciences around the world, on the developing situation – and that is what it was, a developing situation.”
“When WHO issued its first guidance to countries, it was extremely clear that respiratory precautions should be taken in dealing with patients with this disease, that labs needed to be careful in terms of their precautions and taking samples, because there was a risk that the disease could spread from person to person in those environments,” Ryan added.
Though Trump claimed the organization “deprived the scientific community of essential data,” Ryan said, “the virus was identified on January the 7th. The [genetic] sequence was shared on the 12th with the world.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also vaguely touched on Trump’s accusations of Chinese influence, saying the WHO is committed to working with all nations, “without fear or favor.”
“COVID-19 does not discriminate between rich nations and poor, large nations and small. It does not discriminate between nationalities, ethnicities, or ideologies. Neither do we,” he said. “This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat – a dangerous enemy,” as he offered the opportunity to access the organization’s performance after the pandemic has been contained.
In 2019, the United States contributed over $550 million to the organization’s $6 million budget. But, when asked about the impact of Trump’s decision, Tedros said: “We’ll work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work continues uninterrupted.”
