Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations, last week issued the following statement after the Trump administration halted U.S. payments for the World Health Organization (WHO) during a pandemic.
“President Donald Trump’s absolute abdication of international responsibility and leadership is now unequivocally apparent,” she wrote.
“Tonight’s move to halt funding to the World Health Organization in the middle of a global pandemic is the exact opposite of what this country should be doing. As past administrations have done successfully prior, we should be investing in our response capacity and rallying the entire world to respond in a unified fashion to the crisis before us. To abandon this international effort days after our country has officially suffered the world’s largest death toll at the hands of COVID-19 is especially insidious.
“More brothers and sisters will be infected, more mothers and fathers will be admitted to already struggling hospitals and more grandparents will die. This is an attempt by the administration to shift blame away from its own failure to heed internal warnings given as early as January. This administration should be taking every single step possible to build a coalition to defeat this virus. And we must.”
Trump believes that the WHO was slow to respond to the crisis and he is halting U.S. funding for the WHO for 60 to 90 days as his administration reviews the group’s handling of the pandemic. The review is being conducted “to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.”
The WHO describes itself as the directing and coordinating authority on international health within the United Nations system. The U.S. is the largest single government donor, accounting for about 20 percent of the WHO budget.
