Virologist: Trump decision to cut off WHO funding ‘is completely despicable’

President Trump announced Tuesday that his administration would be halting its funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), pending an investigation into how it handled the early phases of the coronavirus outbreak. While many acknowledge the WHO could have done more to challenge early information coming out of China, there are experts who still see cutting off its funding from the U.S. as deeply problematic.

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“The WHO is not perfect,” Columbia University virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen told KIRO Radio’s Gee and Ursula Show. “It’s not a perfect organization, but it’s critical for helping out low and middle income countries in particular, that may have fewer resources that are needed really to deal with this and other types of public health emergencies.”

The decision from President Trump to cut U.S. funding to the WHO was also panned by a handful of world leaders across Europe and Africa, as well as experts and public figures at home and abroad.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates labeled the move “as dangerous as it sounds,” while Tom Peyre-Costa with the Norwegian Refugee Council told the Associated Press that it “defies logic at the height of a global pandemic and will lead to more deaths.”

Dr. Rasmussen echoed those sentiments herself.

“I think that this decision is completely despicable,” she opined. “It’s obviously being motivated by a desire on President Trump’s part to deflect responsibility for his own lack of action early on during this epidemic and now pandemic.”

The WHO has been criticized for its praise of China’s early response to the coronavirus, going so far as to compliment the country’s transparency in keeping the world informed. Despite that early support from the WHO, an investigation from AP found that there was a six-week delay between the time the Chinese government became aware of the virus and when they warned the public that a full-scale public health crisis was likely.

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President Trump was equally as effusive, with CNN identifying at least 12 separate instances in which he praised China’s coronavirus response early on.

That has Dr. Rasmussen believing the decision to cut funding to the WHO was more of a political calculation than anything, something she finds extremely troubling for the future of containing the pandemic across the world.

“I’m incredibly worried at how the politicization of the pandemic domestically will affect public health globally,” she said.

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