Trump blamed ‘WHO’ for coronavirus deaths in ‘US’ and suspended funding for the Organization

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U.S President Donald Trump has announced the United States is suspending funding to the WHO (World Health Organization). The administration of Trump reviews what he described as the group’s disastrous role in covering up the outburst of Covid-19 coronavirus in China. President Trump said, “The reality is the WHO failed to obtain, vet and share information in a timely fashion. The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable”. It is noteworthy that the US President has been alleged for ignoring warnings from his own agencies about the severity of coronavirus as well as failing to act in a timely manner. He said delays the WHO experienced in declaring a public health emergency cost valuable time, tremendous amounts of time.

Trump blamed the WHO of opposing travel bans and repeating the Chinese government’s propaganda that the virus couldn’t be transferred from person to person. He issued a mild threat to withdraw from the organization. He said, “We’ll have no choice but to do that unless the group changes its actions”. Point to be noted that the United States is the largest financial contributor to the WHO and China is at 2^nd place. Trump administration plans to redirect funding allocated for the WHO to work with countries on health issues in other ways. He didn’t describe what those other avenues might be. President also repeated his misleading statement that Washington sends $400 million-$500 million to the WHO each year.

But, the budget documents show just over $100 million annually. There wasn’t an immediate response from the Organization. Democrats in the US Congress blasted Trump’s plan hours before Trump appeared in the Rose Garden and made the announcement at the start of his daily Covid-19 briefing. Senator Jeff Merkley said, “Clearly, multiple failures at both the national and international level led to the pandemic disaster that we are facing today. As an international community, we must look critically at what went right and what went wrong in this global response, and learn from this so that we do not repeat the same mistakes again”.