US President Donald Trump has upped the ante in his war of words with the WHO. Over a month after he temporarily cut funding for the global health body, following its allegedly inadequate handling of coronavirus pandemic, Trump on Monday warned the US could make the funding cut permanent and reconsider US membership of the group. Trump has warned of making permanent the funding cut if the WHO does not commit to “major substantive improvements” in 30 days.
Trump uploaded a letter to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on his official Twitter handle on Monday night. In the letter, Trump details his government's allegations that the WHO had been tardy in its response to the coronavirus pandemic and deferential to China's interests. The letter claims the WHO should have addressed its "alarming lack of independence" from China.
Earlier on Monday, Trump had referred to the WHO as being a "puppet of China". Trump told reporters, “They (WHO) are a puppet of China. They're China-centric, to put it nicer. But they're a puppet of China. I think they have done a very sad job. The United States pays them $450 million a year. China pays them $38 million a year."
THE WEEK's cover on the WHO dated May 10
Trump noted that the WHO had opposed his decision to impose a ban on entry to people arriving in the US from China.
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In his letter to the WHO chief, Trump reiterated many of the aforementioned points and also provided findings of a review of the organisation's response to coronavirus. Trump charged that "WHO consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or ever earlier..." Trump notes the WHO failed to investigate credible reports of the novel coronavirus that "conflicted with the Chinese government's official accounts".
Trump's letter claimed Taiwanese authorities had communicated to the WHO on December 31 that there was human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. "Yet, the WHO chose not to share any of this critical information with the rest of the world, probably for political reasons," Trump wrote.
Trump charged the WHO of being silent in acknowledging warnings from a Chinese researcher, Dr Zhang Yongzhen, who had sequenced the genome of the coronavirus on January 5. Trump charged that the WHO had on January 14 denied that the coronavirus could be spread by human transmission. Trump then directly accused Tedros of being "pressured" by Chinese President Xi Jinping to not declare the coronavirus an emergency. Trump wrote the WHO chief gave in to this pressure and claimed on January 22 that the coronavirus was not a health emergency. The WHO, however, reversed its course on January 30.
Trump also accused the WHO chief of not pressing China to allow admission of a team of WHO experts in January. The experts were allowed entry only on February 16.
Trump compared the WHO's performance under Tedros with that of former WHO chief Harlem Brundtland, who had declared an emergency over a SARS outbreak in China in 2003 and criticised Beijing's handling of the situation.
