Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the Trump administration’s aggressive posture against the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for its perceived mishandling of the initial stages of the COVID-19 breakout.
McEnany pointed to W.H.O.’s “China bias,” which she said put U.S. lives at risk.
“One of the most disturbing things that I think was in the letter the president wrote about the W.H.O. was that on January 21, you had the Chinese President Xi Jinping telling the W.H.O., pressuring the W.H.O. to not call this a health emergency and the very next day you had the W.H.O. saying this is not a public health emergency of international concern,” she said. “That is one of many pieces of evidence we have of the W.H.O., and China slow-walking this information. Lives were put at risk, and U.S. taxpayer dollars will not go to an organization that slow walks information, has a China bias, and puts American lives at risk.”
“I’ll leave it to the president as to what steps he hopes to see,” McEnany added. “The onus is on the W.H.O. here to prove that they don’t have a China bias, that is where the onus lies. 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 in their country, but when the president said, I’m stopping travel at our border from Wuhan, we were told by the W.H.O. that that was a bad decision. So, interesting facts like that really highlight the problems there, but I’ll leave it to the president as to what changes he wants to see.
McEnany noted the gap in funding given to W.H.O. between the United States and China, adding that a question about what the United States was getting in return for that funding.
“[W]hat do we get for that $400 million-odd we give and China giving a fraction of that?” she said. “We get the fact that they hide information given to them from Taiwanese officials that this virus had human-to-human transmission, that information was hidden. The information about this potentially having asymptomatic spread, that also was information not given to us. What have we gotten in return for our money? We finally have a president who says that’s enough of funding these global organizations where we get very little in return.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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