German Chancellor Angela Merkel has voiced strong support for the World Health Organization (WHO) after the United States cut its funding earlier this week. Chancellor Merkel “expressed her full support for the WHO,” German government spokesman Steffan Seibert said on Thursday. German leader “defends the WHO’s work following sharp criticism from Trump,” German weekly Der Spiegel reported.
President Donald Trump announced a 60-day freeze on the U.S. funding going to the WHO, the United Nations’ health agency, for its incompetence and deceptive handling of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. “Today I’m instructing my administration to halt funding of the WHO while a review is conducted to assess the WHO’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,” Trump said on Tuesday while freezing of funding worth $500 million going to the UN agency.
The UN agency has been accused of being Beijing’s accomplice in covering up the origins of the contagion. Right from the onset, the WHO has been passing on official Chinese propaganda as global health advisories, thereby hiding the true nature of the life-threatening virus which originated in China.
German state-funded DW News reported the German Chancellor’s remarks:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has thrown her support behind the World Health Organization (WHO) as it tackles the devastating novel coronavirus pandemic, government spokesman Steffan Seibert said on Thursday.”The chancellor stressed that the pandemic can only be defeated with a strong and coordinated international response,” said Seibert. “To this end, she expressed her full support for the WHO and numerous other partners.”Merkel’s comments were made during a video conference call with G7 leaders, just a day after US President Donald Trump announced he would suspend funding for the UN health agency. (…)The move was widely criticized in Europe. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the funding freeze amounted to “throwing the pilot out of the plane in mid-flight.””It makes no sense at all to question the functioning and significance of the WHO now,” Maas said. He described the WHO as a the “backbone of the fight against the pandemic.”
Since the contagion first appeared in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the WHO has been busy parroting Beijing’s official talking points and praising the Communist regime for its handling of the pandemic. On January 14, the WHO declared that it “found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” citing official Chinese sources. This was one of the deadly falsehoods peddled by the UN agency about the Wuhan virus, as we all painfully found out.
While Germany, the European Union, Canada, and other members of the G7 industrial nations backed the WHO in the wake of the U.S. response, Australia came out against it. Lawmakers of Australia’s governing coalition called for a review of the country’s $64 million funding going to WHO. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne shared the lawmakers’ concerns regarding the UN body’s mishandling of the pandemic, the newspaper Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Since the creation of the WHO shortly after the Second World War, the U.S. has been its biggest benefactor. “For the two-year budget cycle of 2018 and 2019, the U.S. government pledged to contribute $893 million to WHO’s budget,” the NPR reported. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as the biggest non-state player funding the UN agency in recent years, pledging $531 million during the same period.
Trump halts $500m WHO funding for its ‘disastrous handling’ of the coronavirus pandemic
[Cover image via YouTube]
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