
As the pressure on him continues to mount, US President Donald Trump has sent a letter to the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), threatening to pull US funding permanently over Covid-19.
The letter, which outlined a 30-day deadline for the body to commit to “substantive improvements” or risk losing millions and US membership altogether and addressed to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, criticised stages of the body’s response since December.
Earlier on Monday, Trump called the UN’s health body a “puppet of China”.
The president, who faces re-election this year and has himself been criticised for his handling of the pandemic, has blamed China and the WHO for trying to cover up the outbreak and failing to hold Beijing to account, respectively.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Mr Trump was trying to “mislead the public, smear China” and “shift the blame for [the US’] own incompetent response”.
The US has more than 1.5 million of the world’s 4.8 million confirmed cases of coronavirus so far, with more than 90,000 deaths and Trump’s ultimatum also comes at a time of pressure for the WHO.
On Monday, Dr Tedros backed a review of the agency’s handling of the pandemic. He said an independent evaluation would take place “at the earliest appropriate moment”.
However, following a day of heavy criticism of the agency by the US, Trump published the letter on Twitter on Monday night.
Health Secretary Alex Azar spoke at the WHO’s World Health Assembly and accused the organisation of letting Covid-19 spin “out of control” at the cost of “many lives”.
In his letter to Dr Tedros, the US president accused the WHO of having an “alarming lack of independence” from China.
Among many assertions, Trump accused the agency of having “consistently ignored” what he described as “credible reports” of the virus spreading in Wuhan at the start of December or even earlier, cited reports that the WHO delayed an emergency declaration under pressure from President Xi Jinping, criticised the agency’s praise of China’s “transparency” amid its censorship and lack of international co-operation, accused the WHO of failing to comment on virus-related discrimination against Africans within China, said Dr Tedros could have saved “many lives” if he had acted more like Dr Harlem Brundtland (the WHO chief during the SARS outbreak of 2003).
Trump concluded the letter by alleging that “repeated missteps” by Dr Tedros and the WHO had been “extremely costly for the world” and “the only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China”.