speech on Tackling the pandemic, plzz don't directly start with corona virus
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Donald Trump has blamed the World Health Organization for failures in the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic, even threatening to cut its funding, but most health experts say it has performed well with limited resources.
Accusing the WHO of giving bad advice, being “China-centric” and even withholding information, Trump claimed to have stopped US funding in a press briefing on Tuesday, only to claim a few minutes later that he was just considering it, pending a review of its performance.
In fact, the US is already about $200m in arrears in assessed contributions (national membership fees). It has given more in donations, and was the biggest single donor in 2019 – certainly far more than China, which gives a paltry amount given the size of its economy.
But the US is far from providing the majority of the WHO’s funds, as Trump claimed, and its voluntary contributions have largely been tied to specific projects. WHO’s total annual budget is about $2.5bn, and contributions from member states have not significantly increased over three decades.
Donald Trump blames WHO for dire situation in the US, threatens to pull funding – video
“The WHO’s budget is around the equivalent of a large US hospital, which is utterly incommensurate with its global responsibilities,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University. “So, if the US president were a global health leader, he’d be leading a call to at minimum double the WHO budget in the face of this pandemic.”
Now is not the time to cut WHO funds, says official after Trump threat
Global health experts have generally given the WHO good marks for its transparency and the speed with which it has responded to the coronavirus, under its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. It is universally seen as much better than its sluggish, error-strewn response to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, three years before Tedros took over.
“I have been a longstanding critic and I’ve described their performance on Ebola as catastrophic. But I think overall their performance on this outbreak has been, not perfect, but pretty good,” Ashish Jha, a public health professor at Harvard, said.
“They’ve been very transparent as much as they have known the data. They have had daily calls, they have been very clear about the severity of this illness, and how the global community has to respond.”
Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took part in WHO conference calls about coronavirus from 7 January, according to sources familiar with the conversations.
Tedros declared a “public health emergency of international concern” on 30 January, calling on governments to pursue containment and testing efforts. The declaration was criticised by some as coming several days too late, but others say the organisation’s awareness of the dangers was held back by China’s government, which initially suppressed information about the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and refused entry to WHO experts
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