Kayleigh McEnany: WHO funding freeze in place
Kayleigh McEnany, WH Press Secretary, addresses Trump's threat to permanently freeze WHO funding and how the organization put American lives at risk with their 'China bias'
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White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday that “at the moment” it is definite that President Trump will withhold funding from the World Health Organization for another 30 days.
“U.S. taxpayer dollars will not go to an organization that slow-walks information, has a China bias and puts American lives at risk,” McEnany said on Tuesday.
McEnany referenced a blistering letter President Trump released the night before to the head of the World Health Organization, stating that his administration conducted an investigation that confirmed the health body’s multiple failures in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak. In the letter the president also warned that his current funding freeze will become permanent if the organization does not make “substantive” improvements within 30 days.
“The president's letter was very revealing,” McEnany said.
She went on say that “one of the most disturbing things” in the letter constituted “one of many pieces of evidence we have of the WHO and China slow-walking” information related to the novel coronavirus.
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“On January 21, you had the Chinese President Xi Jinping telling the WHO, pressuring the WHO to not call this a health emergency and the very next day you had the WHO saying, ‘this [COVID-19] is not a public health emergency of international concern,’” McEnany noted.
The White House has insisted that Beijing downplayed the virus' threat in December, which led to the subsequent outbreak. China has denied the charge and accused Trump of shirking responsibility to the organization, according to the Agence France-Presse, an international news agency.
“The onus is on the WHO here to prove that they don't have a China bias,” McEnany said on Tuesday.
She added, “They need to assure the United States that taxpayer dollars are used well, particularly when you consider the fact that they were all for China's onerous restrictions of travel into their country, but when the president said ‘I'm stopping travel at our border from Wuhan,’ we were told by the WHO that that was a bad decision.”
She went on to note that “interesting facts like that really highlight the problems there.”
In a statement, the WHO said it was "considering the contents" of Trump's letter.
Previously, the agency pointed out that it declared a global health emergency on Jan. 30, when there were fewer than 100 COVID-19 cases outside of China. At the time, the WHO chief said the world owed China gratitude for the way it bought other nations time to plan, with the extraordinary measures it was taking to contain the virus.
In April, Trump first announced that he was cutting off U.S. payments to the WHO during the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. is the WHO's biggest donor, giving about $450 million a year.
Host Ainsley Earhardt asked McEnany, “Why is the WHO so supportive of China and not us when we bankroll them?”
“That is the million-dollar question,” McEnany said in response.
“And what do we get for that 400 million-odd dollars we give and China giving a fraction of that? We get the fact that they hide information given to them from Taiwanese officials that this virus had human to human transmission,” McEnany continued.
“The information about this potentially having asymptomatic spread, that also was information not given to us,” she went on to say.
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She then added, “We finally have a president who says, ‘That's enough of funding these global organizations where we get very little in return.’”
Fox News’ Edmund DeMarche and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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