(CN) — President Donald Trump is threatening to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization unless it makes major improvements in the next 30 days.
Trump issued his ultimatum late Monday in a letter to the global health agency's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. His threat escalates his feud with Tedros, who he accuses of helping China hide the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in December.
“It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world,” Trump said in the letter. “The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China.”
Trump said there was “no time to waste” and gave Tedros 30 days to commit to make “major substantive improvements.” Unless that is done, Trump said the U.S. will consider dropping out of the WHO and permanently cutting funds to the global health agency.
“I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America's interests,” Trump said.
Trump froze funding to the WHO — a United Nations agency coordinating efforts to end the Covid-19 pandemic — on April 14 and ordered his administration to probe the agency's actions in handling the coronavirus outbreak. His move to freeze funding in the middle of the pandemic was widely criticized by world leaders. However, since then others, including Australia and some European nations, have raised questions about China's transparency over the coronavirus outbreak.
On Tuesday, Tedros did not directly respond to Trump's allegations, but he has said his agency acted quickly to warn the world about the virus. Tedros, who is a former Ethiopian health minister, was elected to head the agency in 2016 with the backing of China and African nations.
Tedros spent Tuesday at the World Health Assembly, an annual gathering of the WHO's decision-making forum made up of representatives from the world's 194 member states. He was expected to hold a news briefing Tuesday, but that event was canceled.
On Tuesday, the World Health Assembly – meeting in a virtual format due to the pandemic – voted in favor of a European Union resolution calling for an independent evaluation of the international response to the pandemic. The probe also will examine the WHO's role.
In a speech to the assembly Tuesday, Tedros welcomed the review and said WHO “wants accountability more than anyone.”
On Twitter, Tedros retweeted a quote from Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta saying “now is not the time for the blame game but to collaborate and find solutions for global recovery not just for pandemic but also climate change.”
Trump said his administration's review of the WHO's actions found serious mistakes in its handling of the outbreak and an “alarming lack of independence” from China. His letter laid out his case against the WHO, but it presented no evidence and little that was new. The letter also included at least two falsehoods. In recent weeks, the U.S. has claimed it has evidence that the virus escaped from a virology laboratory in Wuhan, but Trump did not make that claim in his letter.
Trump accused the WHO of ignoring “credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019” and failing to “independently investigate” those reports.
China officially notified the WHO about an outbreak of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan on Dec. 31. On Jan. 11, China said the outbreak was caused by a novel coronavirus. But it took until Jan. 22 for the WHO, relying on information from China, to announce that the virus was being transmitted between humans. However, WHO says it was telling experts early on that human-to-human transmission was possible.