Trump hits out at WHO over warnings on virus
PRESIDENT DONALD Trump has accused the World Health Organisation (WHO) of “missing the call” on the pandemic as he downplayed warning memos in the US dating as far back as January.
The American President threatened to cease US support of the international body, seeming to suggest it had attempted to minimise the severity of the outbreak.
Senior advisors from WHO have hit back strongly at Mr Trump’s accusations that the body is “very China-centric”, insisting its approach would have been the same wherever the virus originated.
But Mr Trump, speaking at the White House press briefing, said he would cut US funding before minutes later backtracking and saying he would “strongly consider” it.
He also told reporters he was not aware of warning memos from a senior advisor in January, but had unilaterally followed some of their recommendations, including taking steps to curtail travel from China.
He would not have wanted to act prematurely, he insisted, when it was not clear how dire the situation would become
“I don’t want to create havoc and shock and everything else. I’m not going to go out and start screaming, ‘This could happen, this could happen’,” Mr Trump said. “I’m a cheerleader for this country.”
The WHO has praised China for its transparency on the virus, even though there has been reason to believe that more people died of Covid-19 than the country’s official tally.
“They could have called it months earlier, they would have
known, they should have known and they probably did know,” Mr Trump said of WHO officials.
In a virtual press conference, Dr Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, dismissed Mr Trump’s claims.
Speaking 100 days after WHO was first alerted to the “mystery illness” when a handful of people fell ill in Wuhan, Dr Aylward said: “It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to China, work with the Chinese to understand this.
He added: “That’s the approach we would take with every single country.
“It’s got nothing to do with China specifically, it happened to be the place where this started.”
Latest figures put the US death toll at nearly 13,000. There are more than 398,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US, the highest number in the world.