President Donald Trump savaged the ‘China centric’ World Health Organization on Tuesday and said he wanted the group looked into before any more U.S. dollars flow that way.
‘They called it wrong, they called it wrong, they missed the call,’ Trump said during his daily White House press briefing.
‘They should have known and they probably did know,’ he added, suggesting the WHO was withholding information about the coronavirus.
Trump’s main beef with the United Nations health group is that leadership there said it wasn’t necessary to bar travelers coming in from China as the coronavirus started spreading beyond Wuhan, where it originated.
The president has followed the lead of prominent conservatives in complaining that the WHO has been too friendly to China during the coronavirus outbreak.
‘The WHO, that’s the World Health Organization, receives vast amounts of money from the United States and we pay for a majority, the biggest portion of their money, and they actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it,’ Trump said near the top of the briefing. ‘And they were wrong. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things.’
‘And they had a lot of information early and they didn’t want to – they seemed to be very China centric,’ he said, changing the point he was trying to make mid-sentence.
It comes as the people of Wuhan were allowed to emerge from their homes on Tuesday for the first time since January 23. And while the world had looked on at those measures with consternation – as the WHO reassured us the virus was a regional problem – most developed countries have now adopted the same stringent ‘stay at home’ rules.
The COVID-19 death tolls recorded as of Tuesday in Italy (17,127), Spain (14,045), the US (12,876), France (10,328), the UK (6,159) and Iran (3,872), have exceeded the 3,331 reported by the ruling Communist Party in China.
President Trump attacked the World Health Organization on Tuesday, calling it too ‘China centric’ and suggesting that it was hiding information about the coronavirus from the rest of the world
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, annoyed Trump by saying that travel didn’t need to be stopped from China in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak
Later in the briefing Trump threatened to cut off the WHO’s supply of money from the United States.
‘We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it. And we’re going to see,’ Trump said. ‘It’s a great thing when it works but when they call every shot wrong that’s not good.’
‘They are always on the side of China,’ he also complained.
Later when the president was asked if it was a smart move to cut off funds to the major global health organization during a global pandemic he backed away from the definitiveness of his previous threat.
‘I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but I’m going to look at it,’ Trump pledged.
Later, Trump was asked why he thought the WHO was ‘China centric.’
‘I don’t know, they seem to come down on the side of China,’ the president responded. ‘Don’t close your borders to China, don’t do this, they don’t report what’s really going on, they didn’t see it and yet they were there. They didn’t see what was going on in Wuhan … they must have seen it, but they didn’t report it.’
Trump had previewed his attack earlier Tuesday on Twitter.
Trump suggested he might cut the U.S.’s funding that goes toward WHO, calling the United Nations agency ‘very China centric’
The coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China – where Chinese authorities lifted a travel ban on April 8. Conservative allies of Trump have said WHO helped China cover-up the outbreak
‘The W.H.O. really blew it,’ Trump wrote. ‘For some reason, funded largely by the United States yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look.’
Trump was following the lead of American conservatives including Florida Sen. Rick Scott who placed blame on WHO for ‘helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.’
At the same time, Democratic governors, lawmakers and pundits have condemned Trump’s response in combatting the virus, suggesting he did too little, too late.
On January 31, the Trump administration announced travel restrictions on people coming from China due to the outbreak.
Vintage: A tweet from the WHO which hasn’t aged well, pumping out the disinformation fed to it by Beijing about the virus, which it was reticent to declare a pandemic
But on February 3, WHO said such bans were not needed.
‘Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on,’ Trump tweeted Tuesday.
‘Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?’ the president asked.
WHO is also still not recommending that every person wears a mask, while the U.S.’s Centers of Disease Control made the voluntary recommendation last week.
GOP lawmakers have floated that it’s because the WHO is under China’s spell.
Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus should resign because ‘he allowed Beijing to use the WHO to mislead the global community.’
As did Sen. Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican.
‘They need to come clean and another piece of this is, the WHO has to stop covering for them,’ she said of China. ‘I think Dr. Tedros needs to step down,’ McSally said on Fox Business Network.
‘We need to take some actions to address this issue. It’s just irresponsible, it’s unconscionable what they have done here while we have people dying across the globe,’ McSally added.
Scott, the Florida senator, said the Senate Homeland Security Committee needed to launch an investigation into WHO’s handling of the virus.
In late January, Tedros complimented China’s President Xi Jinping for the country’s handling of the virus, as the Chinese leader centralized the response after local officials in Wuhan couldn’t keep the outbreak under control.
A passenger wearing a protective face mask stands with her luggage next to the first official train departing from Wuhan on a first day of ending more than a two-month lockdown on Wednesday
Passengers go through the security and body temperatures check on a first day of ending more than a two-month lockdown
A woman wearing protective gear waits to board one of the first trains to leave Wuhan after the lockdown ended on Wednesday morning
People wearing protective clothing and masks arrive at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan, to board one of the first trains leaving the city in China’s central Hubei province early on April 8
But Xi also controlled the flow of information, with reports coming out of China that the country had been trying to silence whistleblowers.
Last week Bloomberg News reported on a U.S. intelligence memo that said China was under-reporting its coronavirus numbers of cases and deaths.
Trump voiced that he, too, has been skeptical of China’s reporting.
WHO has been criticized for taking Chinese data at face value.
‘Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side, and I’m being nice when I say that,’ Trump said at a daily briefing.
WHO is part of the United Nations and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It has 194 members and two associate members.
The agency is funded in two ways – through assessed contributions and voluntary contributions.
The assessed contributions, which are like dues to the organization, are calculated by looking at a country’s wealth and population.
While the U.S. pays the most in assessed contributions, that full pot of money has only accounted for less than 25 per cent of WHO’s haul over the past few years.
However, Americans NGOs and charity organizations, along with taxpayer dollars, do make up the biggest chunk of the WHO’s funding.
Donald Trump insists US coronavirus death toll is accurate despite warnings from experts and state officials who say true number is much higher because of limited testing and inconsistencies in reporting
President Trump stamped out uncertainty about America’s official coronavirus death count during Tuesday’s White House briefing after a reporter brought up how some areas are struggling to get accurate numbers because of a lack of testing and a uniform system to record the figures.
‘I think they are pretty accurate on the death counts,’ Trump said, interrupting the reporter before she could finish her question.
‘Somebody dies, I think they’ve been pretty accurate. The death counts, I think they are very, very accurate.’
He went on to cast doubt on case counts reported by other countries such as China while insisting that the same problems aren’t occurring in the US.
‘You look at some of these certain countries and I’ll be willing to bet they had more cases, but we are more accurate in our testing,’ he said.
‘We’ve got a good process.’
Dr Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, also stood by the accuracy of the death count when asked about it later in the briefing.
‘I think in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks,’ Birx said.
‘Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown.
‘There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and, let’s say, the virus caused you to go to the ICU, and then have a heart issue or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.
‘Right now we’re still recording it. If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.’
The reporter then pressed Birx by mentioning how some coroners have said that they do not have enough test kits screen people for COVID-19 post-mortem, which could skew the data.
‘I think that would apply to more rural areas that may not have the same level of testing,’ Birx said.
‘I’m pretty confident in New York City and New Jersey and places that have these large outbreaks, and Covid-19 only hospitals, I can tell you they are testing.
‘New York and New Jersey together … are testing extraordinarily well, as well as Washington state and Louisianat, so I don’t see that there has been a barrier in testing to diagnosis.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, then took the podium to reiterate Birx’s statements.
‘I can’t imagine if someone with coronavirus goes to an ICU and they have an underlying heart condition and they die, they’re going to say cause of death: heart attack,’ Fauci said.
‘I can’t see that happening, so I don’t like it will be a problem.’
Dr Deborah Birx, the the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, also stood by the accuracy of the death count when asked about it later in Tuesday’s briefing
Birx and Fauci’s claims that hard-hit areas like New York City are not seeing problems with curating accurate death tolls came hours after Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted just that.
In his own briefing on Tuesday, de Blasio said that people who died in their homes in the past few weeks without having being tested or treated for COVID-19 likely had the disease.
‘I am assuming the vast majority of those deaths are coronavirus related,’ the mayor said of people who’ve died at home recently.
‘It’s understandable in a crisis that being able to make the confirmation is harder to do with all the resources stretched so thin.
Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted on Tuesday that many people have likely died from coronavirus in New York City without being added to the official death toll
‘The first use of all of everything we’ve got – our professionals, our health care workers, our resources – the first thing we are focused on is saving the next life.
‘We do want to know the truth about what happened in every death at home.
‘But I think we can say at this point, it’s right to assume the vast majority are coronavirus-related. And that makes it even more sober, the sense of how many people we are losing, how many families are suffering, how real this crisis is.’
Issues with confirming an accurate death toll were made apparent on Tuesday as the number released by New York City – 3,544 – was well below the number of fatalities that New York state claimed had occurred in the Big Apple – more than 4,000.
Even the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has admitted that the current national death toll is almost certainly lower than the actual number.
‘We know that it is an underestimation,’ CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said of the toll on Sunday.
The purported inaccuracy is partly due to an early lag in available testing, which meant people with respiratory illnesses died without being counted.
Even now, some Americans who die in their homes or at overwhelmed nursing homes are not being tested, epidemiologists tell The Washington Post.
Postmortem testing by medical examiners can be tricky, as procedures vary widely across the United States and some officials argue testing the deceased is a misuse of valuable resources.
The process can also be difficult as examiners, coroners and health care providers are told to ‘use their judgement’ to decide when testing is appropriate.
Additionally, experts said some people who have contracted coronavirus test negative. It’s unclear how common false negatives are.
