A handful of diplomats and bureaucrats appeared on various Sunday talk shows pleading for President Donald Trump to not cut funding to the World Health Organization, as reported by Politico.
Among those who argued against such a move were former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, director of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Tom Inglesby, and WHO special envoy David Nabarro.
While Gottlieb, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” conceded that Trump had “raised a lot of valid concerns” about China’s misleading information and coverups in the early stages of the outbreak, he said that funding the WHO is necessary to deal with the coronavirus as it will supposedly “become an epidemic in the Southern Hemisphere, in parts of the world that don’t have resources to deal with this kind of a global issue.”
Inglesby claimed in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that “the U.S. needs the World Health Organization to function properly,” while Nabarro, on “Meet the Press,” said that the WHO is necessary “to bring together all the best knowledge that we can find.”
The WHO has come under heavy fire for repeating talking points from the Communist government in China, including, most notoriously, spreading the lie early on that the coronavirus was not contagious. In addition to Trump’s repeated threats to cut American funding to the WHO, the WHO’s Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus has faced widespread calls for his resignation over the organization’s mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak.