US President Donald Trump has formally notified Congress that the United States has officially moved to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Congress received notification that POTUS officially withdrew the US from the @WHO in the midst of a pandemic,” Bob Menendez, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, tweeted on Tuesday.
“To call Trump’s response to COVID chaotic & incoherent doesn’t do it justice. This won’t protect American lives or interests – it leaves Americans sick & America alone,” he added.
According to media reports, the United States had submitted its withdrawal notification to the United Nations secretary-general.
Trump and his administration repeatedly assailed the WHO for months and threatened to cut ties with the organization. Experts and Democrats criticized that the Trump administration was trying to shift blames of its mishandling of COVID-19 response and would be counterproductive to addressing the public health crisis.
Late May, US President Donald Trump announced that the country will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization, a move he has threatened throughout the coronavirus pandemic and one that earned quick criticism from both sides of the aisle.
“Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving, urgent global public health needs,” he said addressing a press conference at the White House.
He further said that the “world needs answers from China on the virus. We must have transparency” and stressed that “China pressured the World Health Organisation to mislead the world” about the virus.
As the world as well the United States grappled with the Coronavirus pandemic, the President on April 14 announced cutting off funding of up to USD 500 million annually to the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing the UN body of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread of the deadly coronavirus when it first emerged in China.
Trump administration accused the Geneva-based agency of propagating “false information” and charged that its reliance on Chinese data had “likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide.”
Trump said that the world depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner. “The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable”, he emphasised.
He also accused the WHO of taking side with China in the coronavirus outbreak that has brought the world’s largest US economy, to a standstill.
The American president also claimed that the WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts.
“There was credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate and investigate immediately”, he observed.
“Through middle of January it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human transmission happening despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary”, he said.
According to Trump, the delays the WHO experienced in declaring a public health emergency cost valuable time.
Then on May 18, Donald Trump threatened to permanently freeze US funding to the WHO unless “substantive improvements” were made within 30 days.
He wrote a letter to the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in which he mentioned that ”It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world”.
“If the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization,” he said.