President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused the World Health Organization of minimizing the threat of the coronavirus as he escalated the war-of-words with the humanitarian group.
‘The WHO got it wrong, they got up very wrong. In many ways they were wrong. They also minimized the threat very strongly,’ President Trump said at his daily White House press briefing.
He also charged the group with claiming there was no human-to-human transmission of the deadly disease.
‘As you know they made a statement January 14th that there was no human to human transmission — there was,’ Trump said.
President Donald Trump accused the World Health Organization of minimizing the threat of the coronavirus as he escalated war with agency
President Trump also accused World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of playing politics with his criticism of Trump
The WHO tweeted on January 14, citing Chinese officials who claimed there had been no human transmissions of the virus in its country.
The group later acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission.
In his continued war of words against the WHO, the president reiterated his complaint that the agency was critical when he shut down flights from certain parts of China and he went on to complain about how much money the United States gave the group, which is part of the United Nations.
He said he was thinking about holding back millions of American funding.
‘We are going to study and investigation and make a determination as to what we’re doing. In the meantime we are holding back,’ he said.
His comments came after the head of the World Health Organization warned the president to stop politicizing the coronavirus crisis ‘if you don’t want many more body bags.’
‘At the end of the day, the people belong to all political parties. The focus of all political parties should be to save their people, please do not politicize this virus,’ WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu said in a virtual press briefing.
‘If you want to be exploited and if you want to have many more body bags, then you do it. If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.’
Trump fired back.
‘So when he say’s politicizing he’s politicizing, and he shouldn’t be,’ the president said at his daily briefing when he was asked about Tedros’ comment.
‘I can’t believe he’s talking about politics when look at the relationship they have to China,’ Trump said and repeated his charge the agency favored China above other countries.
Tedros, at his briefing, made an appeal for global unit and said all leaders of all political parties should focus on saving their people.
‘Unity is the only option to defeat this virus,’ he said.
‘Without unity, we assure you even any country that may have a better system will be in trouble and more crisis. That’s our message. Unity at the national level,’ he said. ‘No need to use COVID to score political points. No need. You have many other ways to prove yourselves.’
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu warned President Donald Trump to stop politicizing the coronavirus crisis ‘if you don’t want many more body bags’
President Trump attacked the World Health Organization on Tuesday, calling it too ‘China centric’ and suggesting that it was hiding information about the coronavirus from the rest of the world
‘The United States and China should come together and fight this dangerous enemy,’ Tedros said. ‘They should come together to fight it and the rest of G-20 should come together to fight it, and the rest of the world should come together and fight it.
‘We will have many body bags in front of us if we don’t behave,’ he noted. ‘When there are cracks at [the] national level and global level, that is when the virus succeeds.
The organization has become the latest target of President Trump in his blame game as he points the finger for the devastating effects of the coronavirus – an economic down turn and over 12,000 American deaths – at everyone but his administration. Also feeling Trump’s fury has been China, the states, governors and the Democrats.
The president has called it ‘China-centric’ and complained they ‘missed the call’ when it came to the coronavirus.
Tedros is an Ethiopian microbiologist and internationally recognized malaria researcher, who is the the first non-physician and first African to head the health organization, a role he has held since 2017.
He previously served as Ethiopia’s minister of health and minister of foreign affairs.
Tedros, who is black, said he doesn’t ‘care about personal attacks’ against himself, addressing the death threats and insults he’s experienced amid the global pandemic, which has seen 1.4 million cases worldwide with more than 82,000 deaths in 209 countries across the world.
‘I can tell you personal attacks that have been going on for more than two, three months. Abuses, or racist comments, giving me names, Black or Negro. I’m proud of being Black, proud of being Negro,’ he said. ‘I don’t care to be honest … even death threats. I don’t give a damn.’
Dr. Deborah Birx said the World Health Organization delayed labeling the coronavirus outbreak a ‘global pandemic’
Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, refused to get involved in the White House war with the WHO
On Tuesday President Trump launched a full-scale attack against the agency when he was with holding the millions of dollars the United States’ contributed to it before reversing himself to say there should be an investigation of the group’s response to the pandemic.
Dr. Deborah Birx joined the criticism, saying the group delayed labeling the coronavirus outbreak a ‘global pandemic.’
Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the administration, appeared to implicate the agency’s ties to China – which is rapidly become a conservative talking point – saying the WHO can only respond to information it receives.
‘You know, the WHO can only react to the data it’s given. And when you go back and look at the timeline, it wasn’t until I think almost the middle of January that China reported that there was human-to-human transmission,’ she said on CBS’ ‘This Morning.’
‘We have to really investigate reporting and how the reports were received there. I think it did delay the ability to declare this a global pandemic, an emergency. We can do all of that when we get through this as a global community to really understand how to do this better the next time,’ she noted.
Birx clarified Trump’s remarks when she did a series of interviews Wednesday morning after the White House endured a chaotic day: a shake up in press office, a key watchdog removed by the president, and Trump’s contentious press briefing.
‘When the president said he was holding funds, he didn’t say he was restricting and keeping funds permanently away. But said instead said let’s investigate what happened. Let’s see what happened in our reporting. We’ve done that before with previous outbreaks and previous issues that have occurred at WHO,’ Birx said on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America.’
But Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, refused to get involved in the White House war with the WHO.
‘I can’t get involved in that kind of discussion,’ he said Wednesday morning on Fox News Channel’s ‘America’s Newsroom.’ ‘I just need to focus on what my job is, to see what we can do in this country and globally to put an end to this. The interaction between the WHO is — is something that I really prefer not to get involved with.’
At a daily press briefing on Tuesday, Trump accused the WHO of mishandling the coronavirus outbreak and said: ‘We’re going to put a hold on money.’
When asked by reporters whether it was wise to slash funding to the WHO during a time of emergency, the president quickly backtracked and said he was only looking into a possible suspension of funds.
But he doubled down on his criticism of the group.
‘They called it wrong, they called it wrong, they missed the call,’ Trump said.
‘They should have known and they probably did know,’ he added, suggesting the group was withholding information about the coronavirus.
Trump’s main beef with the United Nations health group is that leadership there said it wasn’t necessary to ban travelers coming in from China as the coronavirus started spreading beyond Wuhan, where it originated.
The president has bragged that his early ban of some travelers from China kept it from being a greater threat to the U.S.
Trump has followed the lead of prominent conservatives in complaining that the WHO has been too friendly to China during the coronavirus crisis.
Earlier on Tuesday, the president attacked the WHO for being ‘China centric’.
He wrote on Twitter: ‘The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look.’
The World Health Organization has been criticized for not pushing China to clarify its response and question its numbers on the disease. There is skepticism about the numbers Beijing is reporting.
Dr. Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, defended the group.
He said: ‘We are now in an acute phase of the pandemic – now is not the time to cut back on funding.’
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric also rejected Trump’s criticism of the WHO and backed director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, for his ‘tremendous work’.
‘For the Secretary General [Antonio Guterres] it is clear that WHO, under the leadership of Dr. Tedros, has done tremendous work on COVID in supporting countries with millions of pieces of equipment being shipped out, on helping countries with training, on providing global guidelines. WHO is showing the strength of the international health system’, he told reporters.
Dujarric added the WHO recently did ‘tremendous work’ in putting its staff on the frontlines to successfully fight Ebola, an infectious and often fatal disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The WHO declared COVID-19 a public health emergency on Jan. 30, which was 43 days before President Trump declared a national emergency in the United States.
The group is part of the United Nations and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland with 150 offices around the world.
The agency is funded in two ways – through assessed contributions and voluntary contributions.
The assessed contributions, which are like dues to the organization, are calculated by looking at a country’s wealth and population.
In its February budget proposal, the Trump administration called for slashing the U.S. contribution to the WHO in half from the previous fiscal year – from $122.6 million to $57.9 million.
While the U.S. pays the most in assessed contributions, that full pot of money has only accounted for less than 25 per cent of WHO’s haul over the past few years.
However, Americans NGOs and charity organizations, along with taxpayer dollars, do make up the biggest chunk of the WHO’s funding.
Trump said near the start of his virus briefing Tuesday: ‘The WHO, that’s the World Health Organization, receives vast amounts of money from the United States and we pay for a majority, the biggest portion of their money, and they actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it.
‘And they were wrong. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’
‘And they had a lot of information early and they didn’t want to – they seemed to be very China centric,’ he said, changing the point he was trying to make mid-sentence.
Later in the briefing Trump threatened to cut off the WHO’s supply of money from the United States.
Trump added: ‘We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it. And we’re going to see.
‘It’s a great thing when it works but when they call every shot wrong that’s not good. They are always on the side of China.’
Later when the president was asked if it was a smart move to cut off funds to the major global health organization during a worldwide pandemic he backed away from his previous threat.
‘I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but I’m going to look at it,’ Trump pledged.
The president was later asked why he thought the WHO was ‘China centric’.
Trump responded: ‘I don’t know, they seem to come down on the side of China.’
‘Don’t close your borders to China, don’t do this, they don’t report what’s really going on, they didn’t see it and yet they were there. They didn’t see what was going on in Wuhan…they must have seen it, but they didn’t report it,’ he said.
Healthcare workers transfer the body of a deceased person for transport at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn
World Health Organisation (WHO) European director Hans Kluge defended the agency after Trump threatened to cut funding. He is pictured (above) during a joint press conference on the Danish handling of coronavirus last month
Trump suggested he might cut the US’s funding that goes toward WHO, calling the United Nations agency ‘very China centric’
A tweet from the WHO in January pushing out the disinformation fed to it by Beijing about the virus, which it was reticent to declare a pandemic
On January 31, the Trump administration announced travel restrictions on people coming from China due to the outbreak.
But WHO said such bans were not needed, noting that ‘travel bans to affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming from affected areas are usually not effective in preventing the importation’ of coronavirus cases, but may instead ‘have a significant economic and social impact.’
And the group noted that ‘restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions.’
‘Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on,’ Trump tweeted Tuesday.
‘Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?’ the president asked.
WHO is also still not recommending that every person wears a mask, while the Centers of Disease Control made the voluntary recommendation last week.
Trump was following the lead of American conservatives including Florida Sen. Rick Scott who placed blame on WHO for ‘helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.’
Other GOP lawmakers have floated a theory that WHO is under China’s spell.
Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus should resign because ‘he allowed Beijing to use the WHO to mislead the global community.’
As did Sen. Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican.
‘They need to come clean and another piece of this is, the WHO has to stop covering for them,’ she said of China. ‘I think Dr. Tedros needs to step down,’ McSally said on Fox Business Network.
‘We need to take some actions to address this issue. It’s just irresponsible, it’s unconscionable what they have done here while we have people dying across the globe,’ McSally added.
Scott, the Florida senator, said the Senate Homeland Security Committee needed to launch an investigation into WHO’s handling of the virus.
In late January, Tedros complimented China’s President Xi Jinping for the country’s handling of the virus, as the Chinese leader centralized the response after local officials in Wuhan couldn’t keep the outbreak under control.
But Xi also controlled the flow of information, with reports coming out of China that the country had been trying to silence whistleblowers.
At the same time, Democratic governors, lawmakers and pundits have condemned Trump’s response in combatting the virus, suggesting he did too little, too late.