The Trump administration this week made good on its threat to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization as part of its plan to drop out of the international group entirely.
The U.S. has pulled the $62 million in funding that the WHO still expected, reassigning it to other work in the United Nations or other international organizations, according to Nerissa Cook, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
The Washington Free Beacon reported the U.S. "is on track to cut its funding and personnel from the agency before July 2021, when President Donald Trump's order earlier this year ending the U.S. relationship with WHO is set to begin, according to senior administration officials working on the matter."
Cook said the U.S. will consider rejoining only after the international body "gets its act together."
The report said U.S. officials informed WHO about the action this week and repeated their demands for reforms. The organization became an issue at the outset of the COVID-19 outbreak when U.S. officials criticized it for praising Chinese "transparency" on the pandemic.
The problems the U.S. cited included that China banned travel within its borders because of the virus but still allowed its citizens to travel abroad.
President Trump had charged: "Chinese officials ignored their reporting obligations to the World Health Organization and pressured the World Health Organization to mislead the world when the virus was first discovered by Chinese authorities. Countless lives have been taken and profound economic hardship has been inflicted across the globe."
American Enterprise Institute scholars Nicholas Eberstadt and Dan Blumenthal, in a New York Post column, charged the WHO "has acted as Beijing's handmaid."
Trump has accused the WHO of being "very China centric." He previously pointed out the organization stated Feb. 3 there was no need for widespread travel restrictions to combat the virus, which originated in Wuhan, China.
Sen. Marthy McSally, R-Ariz., has called for the resignation of WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for his defense of China's actions and his close ties to the communist regime.
Eberstadt and Blumenthal acknowledged that the "fog of war obscures much about the novel coronavirus pandemic."
"But two facts seem absolutely certain," they said. "First, China’s Communist authorities have lied, concealed and misled about the origins of the epidemic and the toll of the virus in China. Second, the World Health Organization has acted as Beijing’s handmaid."
The writers concluded that, consequently, "the global toll of the tragedy will be much greater than it need have been."
They noted that Beijing lies "about, well, everything."
First was the cover-up of the origin of the coronavirus and its ability to be transmitted from human to human. Then the numbers of infections and deaths that followed "obviously" were undercounted.
And then there was the Chinese Communist Party's disinformation campaig in which it claimed the virus came from America.
"Which brings us to the WHO’s malfeasance in this affair," Eberstadt and Blumenthal said. "The WHO should have known at the outset that it was dealing with a bad-faith actor in Beijing. Yet -- instead of immediately insisting upon access, openness and transparency from China, WHO leadership followed the Chinese lead and at times even took the Chinese line."
The president earlier revealed plans to withdraw from the WHO and to halt U.S. funding.
Regarding the latest moves, Cook said: "The position of the White House is that the WHO needs to reform, and that is starting with demonstrating its independence from the Chinese Communist Party. And it needs to make improvements in its ability to prepare for, to prevent, to detect, and to respond to outbreaks of dangerous pathogens."
For 2020, the U.S. had budgeted $120 million for WHO, and $58 million had been dispersed before Trump called a halt.
"The World Health Organization has failed badly ... not only in its response to COVID-19, but to other health crises in recent decades," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Thursday. "In addition, WHO has declined to adopt urgently needed reforms, starting with demonstrating its independence from the Chinese Communist Party."
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