MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Trump halts funding of WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic

Trump, who has reacted angrily to criticism of his administration’s response to the worst epidemic in a century, has become increasingly hostile towards the WHO.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday halted funding to the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, drawing condemnation from infectious disease experts as the global death toll continued to mount.

Trump, who has reacted angrily to criticism of his administration’s response to the worst epidemic in a century, has become increasingly hostile towards the WHO.

The Geneva-based organization had promoted China’s “disinformation” about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak than otherwise would have occurred, Trump said.

“The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable,” Trump told a White House news conference on Tuesday.

Nearly 2 million people globally have been infected and more than 124,000 have died since the disease emerged in China late last year.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was not the time to reduce resources for the WHO.

“Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences,” he said in a statement.

The United States is the biggest overall donor to the WHO, contributing more than US$ 400 million in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathized with Trump’s criticisms of the WHO, especially its “unfathomable” support of re-opening China’s “wet markets”, where freshly slaughtered animals are sold and where the coronavirus first appeared in the city of Wuhan late last year.

“But that said, the WHO also as an organization does a lot of important work including here in our region in the Pacific and we work closely with them,” Morrison told an Australian radio station on Wednesday.

“We are not going to throw the baby out of with the bathwater here, but they are also not immune from criticism and immune from doing things better.”

New York City, the U.S. city hardest hit by the pandemic, revised its death toll sharply up to more than 10,000 on Tuesday, to include victims presumed to have perished from the lung disease but never tested.

U.S. health care advocacy group Protect Our Care said Trump’s WHO funding withdrawal was “a transparent attempt by President Trump to distract from his history downplaying the severity of the coronavirus crisis and his administration’s failure to prepare our nation,”

“To be sure, the World Health Organization is not without fault but it is beyond irresponsible to cut its funding at the height of a global pandemic,” said Leslie Dach, the chair of Protect Our Care.