Trump halts US payments to WHO, citing reliance on China

President Donald Trump said he instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the planet Health Organization for taking China’s claims about the coronavirus “at face value” and failing to share information about the pandemic because it spread.

“The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable,” Trump said Tuesday at a White House news conference . “The outbreak could are contained at its source” if the organization had correctly responded early , he added.

It’s unclear when any halt in payments would become or what proportion authority Trump has got to suspend disbursements, which are authorized by Congress. The US has contributed $893 million to the WHO’s operations during its current two-year funding cycle, consistent with the organization. Administration officials signaled the suspension would be for 60 days.

In a statement Tuesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the prospect to research how the disease spread round the world would come later.

“As it's not that point , it also not the time to scale back the resources for the operations of the planet Health Organization or the other humanitarian organization within the fight against the virus,” he said. “As I even have said before, now's the time for unity and for the international community to figure together in solidarity to prevent this virus and its shattering consequences.”

The move to limit support to the WHO within the midst of a worldwide pandemic is unprecedented. Yet as domestic criticism of the Trump administration’s response has increased and therefore the US became the epicenter of the outbreak, many of the president’s supporters have pointed to the WHO for creating early mistakes they assert undermined the US and worsened the crisis.

The WHO has been a conduit for tension between the US and China for months, with WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus being singled out for blame by allies of the president for being too deferential to Beijing. Representatives for the WHO didn’t answer requests for comment.

Billionaire philanthropist Gates , the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned during a tweet that isolating funds for the WHO “is as dangerous because it sounds.”

The US contributes nearly 1 / 4 of all member state dues for the WHO. That pool of funds — although alittle proportion of the general budget — are used because the organization’s budget to run daily operations, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an professor of international security at the University of Sydney who has written about the politics of pandemic preparedness. the remainder of the funding, called voluntary contributions, come from member states and non-profits and are tailored to specific global health programs.

He warned that Trump could “bankrupt the organization” if the US pulls both member dues and voluntary contributions, adding that the move would undo decades of working leading the planet in fighting diseases. The move could impact global health more broadly beyond the WHO, he added.

“We now have a situation during which the US is vacating a leadership role within the middle of the crisis,” Kamradt-Scott said. “Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics abhors a vacuum even more.”