The director of the World Health Organization is striking back at Trump after his threat to defund the agency.
WHO director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Trump to not politicize the coronavirus crisis "if you don't want more body bags."
He was responding to Trump's remarks the day before in which the president called out the agency for always backing China and "calling every shot wrong" in the fight against COVID-19.
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“At the end of the day, the people belong to all political parties. The focus of all political parties should be to save their people, please do not politicize this virus,” Tedros said referencing Trump's threat to pull funding.
“If you want to be exploited and if you want to have many more body bags, then you do it. If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it,” he added.
On Tuesday Trump announced during the coronavirus briefing that he is looking into freezing funding to WHO over it's poor handling of the coronavirus outbreak. “The W.H.O., that’s the World Health Organization, receives vast amounts of money from the United States and we pay for a majority — the biggest portion of their money,” Trump said. “They actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it, and they were wrong. They have been wrong about a lot of things. They had a lot of information early and they did not want to divert [from being] very China-centric.”
The World Health Organization has come under increasing fire for not pushing back on China's downplaying of the outbreak and for lying about its number of COVID-19 cases.
Back in January the agency claimed that human-to-human transmission of the virus had not been proven. The WHO dragged its feet on declaring a global health emergency, even as China ordered mass lockdowns and the virus continued to spread to more countries.