RPT - Trump Bashing WHO To Cover Up Own 'Totally Mishandled' COVID-19 Policy - Ex-UN Official

LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th April, 2020) US President Donald Trump's decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its alleged misconduct during China's coronavirus outbreak in January is nothing but an electoral stunt to deflect public attention from his own failure to effectively tackle the pandemic, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, a former United Nations official, told Sputnik in an interview.

On Tuesday, Trump said that he was pulling US funding from WHO because the latter failed to report accurately on the virus as it emerged in December and thereby impeded the global response to the pandemic. On Thursday, Trump was joined by Republican lawmakers who had called for the WHO chief to resign and claimed that both the organization and China were at serious fault over the pandemic.

"Scapegoating the WHO is a vile electoral manoeuvre � Trump is actually grandstanding to the American people, trying to give the impression that he is 'in control' and that the fault lies with WHO and, of course, with China," Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, a former UN independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, said.

According to the expert, Trump has all the chances to succeed in his political goals, as neither UN agencies nor China enjoys popularity among Americans, including due to "fake news" and relevant campaigns in the mainstream media.

The fault for the United States' ineffective COVID-19 response, meanwhile, lies with the "wrong priorities" of the US administrations, which for decades have been prioritizing military expenditure over health care, the former UN official argued.

"Trump himself has totally mishandled the pandemic in the US and bears responsibility for the human consequences. WHO is surely not perfect, neither is the ILO [International Labour Organization], WIPO [World Intellectual Property Organization], OCHA [UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] or the UN Secretariat in general. But they do a lot with the limited financing available," he said.

If the US had devoted a greater share of the budget to its health care, the expert noted, the country would not be in "the mess we are today."

A global effort to properly finance research into new methods of disease control and pandemic prevention would have significantly helped the current situation, while cutting funding to WHO can hardly be a solution, according to de Zayas.

The former UN official also went on to defend WHO's initial response to the coronavirus, arguing that it was not the responsibility of such an organization to reject or consistently doubt what is being told by national authorities.

"WHO cannot go around second-guessing governments. They did send quite a few delegations on the ground and investigated as thoroughly as the available funds allowed. China was initially cautious in not wanting to create panic and did not sound the alarm until they were convinced that a danger to world health had emerged. Since then the Chinese authorities have been extremely pro-active in addressing the crisis in China and in providing assistance to the world," he argued.

The US currently ranks first in the world in terms of both confirmed COVID-19 cases with over 671,000, as well as fatalities, with more than 33,000.