The United States President Donald Trump wrote a letter to the World Health Organisation General director threatening of permanently freezing the donations if the health body does not commit to substantive improvements in the next 30 days.
Earlier last month, the United States President accused the United Nations body of being complicit in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. The President also followed up with accusations of the health body promoting China’s misinformation about the novel coronavirus outbreak. Following that, Donald Trump suspended United States contributions to the World Health Organization. The World Health Organisation officials have denied accusations.
On Monday, Donald Trump threatened to permanently freeze the United States’ contributions if the body will not commit to improvements in the next month. In the letter, he wrote,
“If the WHO does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the WHO permanent and reconsider our membership.”
A four-page letter of several accusations
In the letter, Donald Trump accused the WHO of not being independent of the Republic of China. He further accused the organization of consistently ignoring credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan including the Lancet medical journal report. He said that despite the organization knowing about a major health concern in China and the Taiwanese government informing about human-to-human transmission, the organization refused to acknowledge and share the information with the world.
In a four-page long letter, President Trump leveraged several accusations on the organization and said,
“Perhaps worse than all these failings in that we know that the World Health Organization could have done so much better.”
President Donald Trump further wrote in the letter,
“It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world. The only way forward for the World Health Organisation is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China. My administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste.”
Source: The Indian Express
