Yesterday these pages highlighted
Xi Jinping
’s address to the World Health Assembly on May 18th. We mentioned then two other documents that struck us as critical to an understanding of that meeting of the governing body of the World Health Organization (WHO). One of these was the resolution the Assembly adopted on May 19, a resolution that included a call for a report on the responses to COVID-19. The other was
President Trump
’s May 18 letter to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO),
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The letter began with the note that:
On April 14, 2020, I suspended United States contributions to the World Health Organization
pending an investigation by my Administration of the organization’s failed response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
It ended with this warning:
[I]t is my duty, as President of the United States, to inform you that, 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 and reconsider our membership in the organization.
But, as today’s featured quote makes clear, the President did not wait 30 days. He announced that the United States would cut all funding and sever all ties to the WHO on May 29, just 11 days after sending his strong letter to Director-General Tedros. Here is some of what the President said about ther WHO in his Rose Garden statement:
China has total control over the World Health Organization
, despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million a year.
We have detailed the reforms that it must make and engage[d] with them directly, but they have refused to act. Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving, urgent, global public health needs.
That statement was partially about the WHO and all about China and the U.S.-China relationships. In it, the President touched on trade, on China’s financial dealings, on its actions in the South China Sea, and on the most recent threats to Hong Kong. He had a lot say about Hong Kong. All of these issues affect global trade and investment, but for today we’ll stick with the President’s dialogue with the World Health Organization.
The are 17 hard-hitting bullet points in the President’s May 18 letter to Dr. Tedros, and that’s not counting remarks in other paragraphs, such as the letter’s reference to the WHO’s “alarming lack of independence from the People’s Republic of China.” The assertions in the letter are very troubling, and we assume they are factually correct. That certainly includes the description of China’s odd travel policies for Wuhan in the wake of the first diagnoses as well as its selective treatment of participants in the WHO fact-finding mission once a group was allowed in.
On China’s Travel Policies,
the president wrote:
You [Dr. Tedros] … strongly praised China's strict domestic travel restrictions, but were inexplicably against my closing of the United States border, or the ban, with respect to people coming from China. I put the ban in place regardless of your wishes. Your political gamesmanship on this issue was deadly, as other governments, relying on your comments, delayed imposing life-saving restrictions on travel to and from China. Incredibly, on February 3, 2020, you reinforced your position, opining that because China was doing such a great job protecting the world from the virus, travel restrictions were “causing more harm than good.” Yet by then the world knew that,
before locking down Wuhan, Chinese authorities had allowed more than 5 million people to leave the city and that many of these people were bound for international destinations all over the world.
Mission of Medical Experts.
President Trump also criticized Dr. Tedros for not pressing China harder on allowing early access to Wuhan from a WHO team of experts. A team did arrive in China on February 16, but as the President’s letter explained:
[E]ven then, the team was not allowed to visit Wuhan until the final days of the visit. Remarkably,
the World Health Organization was silent when China denied the two American members of the team access to Wuhan entirely.
