Trump Hints at Cutting WHO Funding Over Handling of Pandemic

President Donald Trump, flanked by officials and business leaders, announces a national emergency with regard to the CCP virus in the White House Rose Garden in Washington on March 13, 2020. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump hinted at cutting funding for the World Health Organization on Tuesday, over the group’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The W.H.O. really blew it,” the president said in a statement on social media, using the acronym for the United Nations’ organization.

“For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look,” he added.

WHO is closely aligned with the Chinese communist regime and has repeatedly praised China’s leaders despite experts and unearthed evidence showing how officials manipulated the true situation in the country, where the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, emerged last year.

The United States provides 14.67 percent of WHO’s funding. It’s the largest source of funding for the group. U.S. contributions to WHO last year exceeded $400 million, according to the State Department.

American lawmakers have called on Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, to resign amid accusations of helping the Chinese Communist Party cover up the outbreak and probing whether WHO is complicit in the manipulation.

“We know Communist China is lying about how many cases and deaths they have, what they knew and when they knew it—and the WHO never bothered to investigate further. Their inaction cost lives,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in a statement.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, right, and WHO Health Emergencies Program Director Michael Ryan attend a press briefing on COVID-19 in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 6, 2020. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

“We could cut funding or we could tie future funding to certain changes,” Scott added to the Daily Signal. “It is supposed to be the World Health Organization, world health, but it panders to China.”

A spokeswoman for the WHO told The Epoch Times in an email that the organization “expects all its Member States to report data in a timely and accurate manner under the international protocols that have been agreed by the Member States of WHO.”

“Membership in WHO and signing up to the International Health Regulations both carry with it the responsibility to prioritize public health, nationally and internationally, not only because global health norms say so, but because the two are inextricably linked, as this global pandemic has made clear to the world,” she said in the email sent last week, pointing to WHO official Dr. Mike Ryan telling reporters that people should be “very careful” not to “be profiling certain parts of the world as being uncooperative or nontransparent.”

WHO didn’t immediately respond to a request for a response to Trump.

Reporters have regularly pressed WHO officials on China’s role in the CCP virus spreading around the world but each time the officials have deflected answering directly. They often end up saying things similar to the statements from top Chinese officials. WHO has also faced questions on its dealings with Taiwan.

Trump on Tuesday noted that WHO officials earlier this year denounced travel restrictions that countries began implementing to try to curb the spread of the virus, saying, “Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on.”

“Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?” he added.