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SALT LAKE CITY — President Donald Trump is right to defund the World Health Organization, Sen. Mike Lee said Wednesday.
“The U.S. should spend the taxpayer money wasted on WHO to provide relief from COVID-19 directly on those impacted instead,” Lee said on Twitter.
The Utah Republican also called for Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, and his senior staff to resign.
Lee’s comments came on the heels of a letter Trump sent Monday to Tedros threatening to make permanent his temporary freeze on U.S. funding to the WHO and reconsider membership in the organization if it doesn’t commit to “major substantive improvements” in the next 30 days.
Trump suspended contributions to the WHO on April 14 contending that it helped China cover up the origin and extent of its coronavirus outbreak. The U.S. contributed nearly $900 million to the organization in 2018-19, which had a $4.4 billion budget for those years.
“It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world,” the president wrote. “The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China.”
In April, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, said cutting WHO funding is “absolutely” the right thing to do. China and Tedros have “long” list of questions they need to answer, he said.
A group of Republican senators, including Utah’s Mitt Romney, have called for the United Nations to form a panel of experts to conduct an independent review of the WHO’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, particularly its interactions with the Chinese government from the start of the outbreak and beyond.
Romney said in a tweet in April that the WHO appears to have shown “remarkable” deference to the Chinese government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
