U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw altogether from the World Health Organization, a move that would leave Chinese leader Xi Jinping as the most prominent voice leading the global fight against the pandemic.
In a four-page letter detailing his grievances with the WHO, Trump called on the group to “demonstrate independence from China,” renewing a complaint that led him in April to temporarily suspend U.S. funding. He posted the letter on Twitter late Monday.
“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,” Trump wrote to Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
In his tweet, Trump called the letter “self-explanatory.” Still, he gave no other details about the reforms he was seeking or what specific changes might unlock funding.
In his letter, Trump repeated calls for “an impartial, independent and comprehensive review” of how the WHO handled the crisis. The World Health Assembly, the WHO’s governing body, on Tuesday passed a resolution calling for an independent assessment of the global response to the pandemic, whch the WHO has said it welcomes and will initiate at an unspecified time.
“The WHO is fully committed to transparency, accountability and continuous improvement,” Tedros said in closing remarks to the assembly, without commenting directly on Trump’s letter. “We want accountability more than anyone.”
Trump made the letter public hours after Xi addressed the Geneva-based group’s governing body, the World Health Assembly, by video link. Xi promised to devote $2 billion toward fighting the pandemic over the next two years while urging greater international cooperation to defeat the virus, which has infected 4.8 million people worldwide and killed more than 318,000.
On Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Trump’s letter was “full of insinuations” and aimed “to mislead the public and to achieve the purpose of stigmatizing China’s epidemic control efforts while shirking its own responsibility.” He added that WHO member fees were decided by all member states, and the U.S. has an obligation to pay the full amount.
“Arbitrarily cutting funding to an international organization is unilateralist behavior,” Zhao said. “We urge the U.S. to stop passing the buck and deepen international cooperation.”
The WHO has become fully ensconced in a wider U.S.-China fight for global dominance that has touched everything from trade and technology to university students and journalists.
“If Trump were to make good on his threat, it would leave the door wide open for China to increase its influence within the WHO even further,” said Hugo Brennan, principal Asia analyst at Verisk Maplecroft. “Greater influence within the WHO would make it easier for Beijing to shape the global narrative around the pandemic and deflect criticism of its own initial missteps.”
Last month, Trump said he would temporarily suspend U.S. funding to the WHO, accusing the group of being too supportive of China.
“If you don’t give money, if you quit this organization, then you have zero influence,” said Shen Dingli, a foreign policy scholar based in Shanghai. “America would hurt itself and hurt the entire world. I don’t think China would want to see America quit.”
Administration officials indicated at the time the freeze would last 60 days pending a review. But Trump wrote in his letter that the review “confirmed many of the serious concerns I raised.”
Trump’s letter listed several examples of what he said were the WHO’s inaccurate statements about the virus and its praise of the Chinese government’s response.
The president said the United Nations agency “consistently ignored credible reports” of an outbreak in Wuhan, China, last December, then “belatedly” declared it a public health emergency in late January. He said the organization was “inexplicably against” his decision to curb travel from China at the time, even though it “strongly praised China’s strict domestic travel restrictions.”
An allegation in the letter that WHO ignored a December warning from the Lancet about the virus is inaccurate, the medical journal said Tuesday. Its first article about the outbreak was on Jan. 24, according to an email.
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