Hours after US President Donald Trump threatened to withhold funding from the United Nations’ health agency, World Health Organization (WHO) officials denied that the body was “China-centric”. They also said that this phase of a pandemic was not the time to cut funding.
US has been funding the WHO which reportedly had issued bad advice during the coronavirus outbreak.
“We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding,” Dr Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said at a recent briefing.
Meanwhile, Dr Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the WHO Director-General, also defended the agency saying, "It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this. This is what we did with every other hard-hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically," he told reporters.
Earlier in the week, during a press briefing US president Trump accused and criticized the WHO of mishandling the coronavirus outbreak stating that, "We're going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. They called it wrong, they called it wrong, they missed the call. They should have known and they probably did know."
Also, when reporters asked whether it was good to cut the funding to the WHO, Trump immediately replied saying, he was only looking into a possible suspension of funds.
