darkwolf666
Well-known member
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/07/trump-coronavirus-who-funding-deaths-briefing
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 it 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 minimise the scale of the outbreak.
Shaking his head peevishly, 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.”
But 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 30 January, nearly a month before Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA”, and proclaimed: “One day – it’s like a miracle - it will disappear.” He eventually declared a national emergency on 13 March.
I saw this exchange last night. Put the laptop lid down. And trudged upstairs, shaking my head.
That, from the leader of the most powerful nation in the world (maybe), is almost as scary as the virus itself...