President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to put a hold on $58m in funding to the World Health Organization saying it had been “very China-centric” during the coronavirus pandemic, Breitbart reports.
“We want to look into the World Health Organization because they really called it wrong,” Trump said. “They missed the call, they could have called it months earlier, they would have known, they should have known, and they probably did know.”
The president pointed out that WHO actually criticized his travel ban late January.
“Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said about travel bans just days after Trump banned travel from China.
Trump said the WHO frequently sided with China despite heavy criticism for their lack of transparency about the virus. “They seem to be very China-centric,” he said. “That’s a nice way of saying it, but they seem to be very China-centric, and they seem to err always on the side of China.”
“It’s a great thing when it works, but when they call every shot wrong, it’s no good,” he said.
Later in the briefing, reporters asked why he would freeze funding to the WHO in the middle of a pandemic. “I’m not saying I’m going to do it. But we’re going to look at it,” the president said.