Washington, D.C. — Today, President Donald Trump declared that his administration would withhold funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) amid a review of the organization’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, released this statement following the announcement:
Attempting to cut funding for the WHO during a global pandemic is the latest example of President Trump making a horrific problem worse. America should be boosting international organizations such as the WHO that are helping the world fight the pandemic—not undermining them.
This is nothing more an effort to deflect blame. Every country in the world has responded to this crisis with the same information from the WHO, yet only the United States has more than 600,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 25,000 deaths. The fact that Trump is berating the WHO for being too kind to China is even more absurd given that he spent the key months of this crisis thanking China and praising their “transparency” himself.
The president should be spending his time solving the public health threat that has crippled the U.S. economy. Instead, he is engaged in a game of charades to change the conversation away from the fact that he spent months downplaying the threat coronavirus posed to the American people as well as to divert attention from his failure to deliver the testing capacity needed to reopen the economy and the lifesaving equipment that front-line health care workers have been pleading for to do their jobs safely.
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