As the coronavirus outbreak explodes across the U.S. and the failings of the Trump administration’s delayed response to the pandemic become increasingly clear, President Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge his own mistakes, instead casting blame on everyone from state governors to former President Barack Obama for his administration’s failure to act. And on Tuesday, the president cemented another scapegoat for his pandemic response: the World Health Organization. Casting blame on the global agency for its response to the pandemic when it originated in China, Trump announced Tuesday that the government will suspend funding to the WHO, pending a “review” of the organization’s “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus.”
Trump announced the funding cut during his Tuesday press briefing, as he criticized the organization for “severely mismanaging and covering up” the coronavirus outbreak when it first appeared in Wuhan, China, and said it “must be held accountable.” “With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns about whether America’s generosity has been put to the best use possible,” Trump said. “The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion.”
The U.S. is the largest single-country contributor to the WHO, with its funding making up 15 percent of the organization’s budget, per NBC News. Trump, complaining that the agency is too “China-centric,” said the U.S. would work with the WHO to reform its failings but would direct its funding elsewhere in the meantime, saying, “for the time being, we will redirect global health and directly work with others.” “All of the aid we send will be discussed at very, very powerful letters and with very powerful and influential groups, and smart groups, medically, politically, and every other way” the president said. “We will be discussing with other countries and global health partners what we do with all of that money that goes to WHO.”
The president’s lambasting of the WHO, however, is laden with hypocrisy, given Trump’s own lack of action and past statements on the pandemic. Though now criticizing the WHO for “the delays [it] experienced in declaring a public health emergency,” which Trump said “cost valuable time, tremendous amounts of time,” the Trump administration failed to act and continued to downplay the disease even after the WHO had sounded the alarm and declared a public health emergency on January 30. (U.S. intelligence agencies had raised concerns about the coronavirus even before then, which the New York Times reports Trump ignored.) “I think that is a problem that is going to go away,” Trump said in late February, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already started speaking out about the impending pandemic. The Times reports the president still had an “inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings” at that late stage, and was “instead revert[ing] to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.” The president did impose travel restrictions on flights from China, which he criticized the WHO Tuesday for opposing. Though Trump has described his move as a key strategy that could have stopped countries around the world from having their own outbreaks, however, Trump’s travel restrictions weren’t actually the sweeping, successful measures he claims. The Times reports that 430,000 people traveled from China to the U.S. since coronavirus was first reported in China, including nearly 40,000 who arrived in the U.S. after Trump’s so-called “ban” was imposed. An analysis conducted by the Times analysis found that Trump’s “travel measures, however effective, may have come too late to have ‘kept China out.’”
Another source of Trump’s ire Tuesday was the WHO not calling out China’s “lack of transparency” in making public the true extent of their outbreak, as the president claimed that if the organization had, “the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death.” But Trump himself was again part of the problem, talking up his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping while openly praising China’s supposed transparency about the disease. “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Trump tweeted January 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”