Trump Announces, Then Reverses, Freeze on Funding for World Health Organization

“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 at the outset of a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House.

Minutes later, though, the president walked back the declaration, telling reporters that he was “looking into it” and conceding that a global pandemic was “maybe not” the best time to freeze funding for the international organization.
“I mean, I‘m not saying I‘m going to do it, but we are going to look at it,” Trump said, denying his comments from minutes earlier when pressed by reporters. “I said we’re going to look at it. We’re going to investigate it, we’re going to look at it. But we will look at ending funding.”

The president appeared to be following through on a threat he‘d made earlier in the day to slash federal funding for the organization.

“The WHO really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look,” Trump wrote on Twitter earlier in the day.

“Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on,” he added. “Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?”

Throughout the administration’s response to the pandemic, the president has repeatedly promoted his decision in late January to close the border to foreign nationals who had recently been in China while instituting a mandatory two-week quarantine for US citizens returning from the country’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak.

Those directives contradicted a series of WHO recommendations cautioning that “travel bans to affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming from affected areas are usually not effective in preventing the importation” of coronavirus cases, but may instead “have a significant economic and social impact.”

“In general, evidence shows that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions,” the WHO reported, adding that such measures could “interrupt needed aid and technical support” and “disrupt businesses.”

The WHO did acknowledge, however, that travel restrictions “may have a public health rationale at the beginning of the containment phase of an outbreak, as they may allow affected countries to implement sustained response measures, and non-affected countries to gain time to initiate and implement effective preparedness measures.”

But the restrictions “need to be short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and be reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves,” the WHO advised.

The president’s initial order and the administration’s subsequent actions, of course, did not heed any of those conditions.