The United States continues to struggle with the effects of the pandemic with the number of cases increasing per day as well as the thousands of deaths at the same time. After previously accusing the World Health Organization of supposedly getting the pandemic wrong, President Donald Trump takes another swipe at the organization for being biased towards China.
The Guardian reports that upon being pressed regarding the supposed plans to withhold funding for the WHO, Trump revealed that they are looking to end funding because the organization reportedly was wrong about a lot of things about the pandemic. “We’re going to investigate it, we’re going to look at it. But we will look at ending funding, yeah, because you know what, they called it wrong,” said Trump.
When asked whether withholding WHO funding was a good idea during this time, Trump stated that everything appeared to be biased towards China. “And if you look back over the years even, everything seems to be biased towards China. That’s not right,” said the President.
Trump has previously criticized the numbers coming from China over the more recent weeks, saying that their number of new cases was “a little on the light side.” The province of Wuhan, where the outbreak all started back in December, has recently been reopened after a 76-day lockdown, its citizens already beginning to return to normal life.
Following Trump’s accusation towards the United Nations’ health body, WHO responded and said that it would be a bad idea to withhold funding at this time. “We’re still in an acute phase of the pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding,” said WHO Europe regional director Dr. Hans Kluge.
As with Trump’s accusation that WHO is very China biased despite being funded by the United States, senior adviser to the WHO director-general Dr. Bruce Aylward rejected the claims made by the President. “It was absolutely critical in the early part of the outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this. This is what we did with every other hard-hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically.”