For weeks, President Trump has faced relentless criticism for having overseen a slow and ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, failing to quickly embrace public health measures that could have prevented the disease from spreading.
Recent polls show that more Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the virus than approve.
So on Tuesday, the President tried to shift the blame elsewhere, ordering his administration to halt funding for the World Health Organisation and claiming the organisation made a series of devastating mistakes as it sought to battle the virus.
He said his administration would conduct a review into whether the WHO was responsible for “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread.
“So much death has been caused by their mistakes,” the President told reporters during a White House briefing.
As of Tuesday, there had been about two million cases of the virus worldwide, and nearly 125,000 deaths. In the US, there have been over 600,000 cases and 25,000 deaths from the virus.
The attack on the WHO, which was founded after World War II as part of the UN “to promote and protect the health of all peoples”, was the latest example of the President’s attempt to shift the blame throughout the crisis.
Over the past several months, Trump has repeatedly accused the news media, governors, Democratic members of Congress and former President Barack Obama of being responsible for the number of cases overwhelming the nation’s hospitals. Asked directly in mid-March whether he was to blame for the lack of testing capacity in the country, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
The basis for the President’s anger at the WHO was his contention that it was too quick to believe information about the virus coming from the Chinese government at a time when it should have been more critical. He said the WHO “willingly took China’s assurances to face value” and “pushed China’s misinformation”.
But it was Trump himself who went out of his way to publicly raise the Chinese government for its handling of the virus at a time at the beginning of the year that his administration was negotiating a trade deal with China.
On January 24, about a month after the virus was discovered there, Trump tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency”.
In a contentious back-and-forth with reporters on Tuesday after his announcement in the Rose Garden, the President refused to answer for that inconsistency, saying that he “would love to have a good relationship with China” even as he asked why “am I the only leader who closed my borders against China?”
Pressed on why he is taking action now, Trump insisted that the WHO is very “China-centric” without explaining what that meant or why that would have caused vast numbers of people to succumb to the coronavirus.
In a statement issued on Tuesday night, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the UN, defended the WHO, saying it “must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against Covid-19”.
Guterres said that “it is possible that the same facts have had different readings by different entities”, but he insisted that the middle of a pandemic was not the time to resolve those differences.
“It is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organisation or any other humanitarian organisation in the fight against the virus,” he said. The biennial budget for the WHO is about $6 billion, which comes from member countries around the world. In 2019, the last year for which figures were available, the US contributed about $553 million.
According to Trump, the WHO “fought” the US after he ordered limits on flights from China on January 31.