US President Donald Trump on Tuesday hunted for a new scapegoat in an increasingly frantic attempt to shift blame for thousands of American deaths from COVID-19, accusing the WHO of having “called it wrong” and being “China-centric.”
The US president contradicted himself within minutes, first vowing to put “a very powerful hold” on his government’s funding of the WHO, then insisting such a freeze was only under consideration.
Trump’s early inaction has come under renewed scrutiny in the past day after a New York Times report that White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro warned in a memo in late January that the virus could put millions of Americans at risk and cost trillions of US dollars.
Photo: Reuters
Former US national security adviser Susan Rice told the Washington Post that Trump’s missteps “cost tens of thousands of American lives.”
The US president has repeatedly denied responsibility and sought to blame China, the administration of former US president Barack Obama and the media.
On Tuesday, with the US death toll exceeding 12,000, he unleashed a tirade at the WHO, even though it raised the alarm in January, after which he made statements downplaying the coronavirus and comparing it to the common flu.
“They’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” Trump said at the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing. “And they had a lot of information early and they didn’t want to — they seemed to be very China-centric” — implying that the WHO had toed the line of Beijing’s early efforts to minimize the scale of the outbreak.
He added: “They called it wrong, they called it wrong. They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known and they should have known and they probably did know. So we’ll be looking into that very carefully and we’re going to put a hold on money spent [sic] to the WHO.”
“We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works, but when they call every shot wrong, it’s not good,” he said.
However, soon after, Trump was asked if the middle of a pandemic was the time to suspend money for the WHO.
“No, maybe not,” he replied, backtracking from his earlier remark. “I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but we’re going to look at.”
A reporter interjected: “You did say that.”
Trump retorted: “No, I didn’t, 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, yeah, because you know what, they called it wrong, and if you look back over the years even, everything seems to be very biased toward China. That’s not right.”
The WHO declared COVID-19 a public health emergency on Jan. 30, nearly a month before Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” adding: “One day - it’s like a miracle - it will disappear.”
He eventually declared a national emergency on March 13.
Trump has long been skeptical about multinational organizations.
In its most recent budget proposal in February, his administration requested a reduction of the US contribution to the WHO from an estimated US$122.6 million to US$57.9 million.
On Tuesday, Trump also played down January and February memos from Navarro, saying that he had not seen them at the time, but did “more or less” what his trade adviser suggested by imposing travel restrictions on China.
It was reported this week that nearly 40,000 people have flown from China to the US since the partial ban came into effect on Feb. 2.
He would not have wanted to act prematurely, Trump added, when it was not clear how bad the situation would become.
“I don’t want to create havoc and shock and everything else. I’m not going to go out and start screaming: ‘This could happen, this could happen.’ I’m a cheerleader for this country,” he said.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS