President Donald Trump has made good on another threat: He is pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization following the discovery that the organization bent to China’s will and helped Beijing cover up the coronavirus outbreak for weeks.
In comments Friday, the president, who was initially speaking about the incident surrounding the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd and the resulting rioting, noted that the WHO “failed to make the requested and greatly needed” reforms in order to continue receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars.
In mid-April, the president suspended U.S. funding to the WHO, a decision that was blasted by Democrats and other China allies. At the time, Trump said the pause would last 60 to 90 days as his administration undertook an investigation into the “China-centric” organization that had caused “so much death” by “severely mismanaging and covering up” the coronavirus spread.
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After his announcement, House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and House Subcommittee on National Security Chairman Steven Lynch, D-Mass., wrote a letter to the president ripping his decision to withhold funding to the organization amid the global pandemic.
“While we may agree that the WHO has shortcomings that must be corrected, your attack on the global health organization can easily be seen as a deliberate but transparent effort to deflect responsibility for your own failures onto others,” Maloney and Lynch wrote, adding that Trump’s “attempt to blame the WHO for trusting China reflects an astonishing level of hypocrisy given your own fawning and widely publicized praise of President Xi Jinping and his government for their handling of this crisis.”
“While the WHO may have made mistakes in its response to this crisis, it was certainly not alone, and it defies logic to withhold support from the WHO at this pivotal moment—at the height of a global pandemic—when promoting the health of nations around the world is essential to protecting our own population and rebuilding our own economy,” the China shills added.
In fact, U.S. and German intelligence agencies found evidence that Chinese President Xi Jinping pressed WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to delay release of crucial information regarding the pandemic.
Xi met with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on January 21 to request that he withhold information about human-to-human transition and delay the declaration of a global pandemic, according to German magazine Der Spiegel. The news comes amid rising sentiment that China should be held financially responsible for the pandemic.
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“The BND’s verdict is harsh: At least four, if not six, weeks have been lost in Beijing’s information policy in the fight against the virus,” Der Spiegel reported.
A few weeks later, the Trump administration pulled funding from a Chinese-based research project into bats and coronaviruses at a facility where COVID-19 is believed to have accidentally escaped.
Then, earlier this month, the president threatened to pull out of the organization unless it made some vital reforms.
“They’re a puppet of China, they’re China-centric to put it nicer,” he said at the White House. “They gave us a lot of bad advice.”
