Coronavirus Crisis Deepens: King Trump to Stop Funding of World Health Organization
If Trump and global agencies such as the WHO did not take proper action to stop the coronavirus contagion in India, it will continue to pose a serious risk for the entire world during the next many months.
By Rakesh Raman
The global coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis is expected to worsen as President Donald Trump is playing cheap politics over the pandemic that has already claimed nearly 127,000 lives and 2 million coronavirus patients are still struggling to survive.
As Trump had been dismissing the disease as some kind of hoax spread by his rivals in the Democratic party, the U.S. has become the epicenter of coronavirus, although it is believed that the virus initially started spreading in December 2019 from Wuhan in China.
Currently, because of Trump’s failure to handle the crisis, the U.S. has the maximum number (over 600,000) of coronavirus cases with nearly 30,000 deaths that happened during the past couple of months.
Trump has been saying that the virus will disappear miraculously and refuting the claims of health experts about the lethality of the disease. Although Trump lacks understanding of the subject, he has been promoting an untested medicine Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) or chloroquine to treat coronavirus patients.
Despite health experts’ advice to continue lockdown in the country until the spread of virus is fully contained, Trump has threatened to open the businesses authoritatively. He has also threatened to impose his decision on different states asking them to lift restrictions on movement of people. His opponents claim that Trump is behaving as a king in a democratic country.
While Trump failed miserably in saving the lives of thousands of Americans, he is putting the blame on World Health Organization (WHO) for mismanaging the containment efforts. Trump – without any evidence – claims that WHO failed to collect and disseminate information about coronavirus.
A White House statement released Tuesday (April 14) revealed that President Trump is halting funding of WHO while a review is conducted to assess the health agency’s role in mismanaging the coronavirus outbreak.
President @realDonaldTrump is halting funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess WHO’s role in mismanaging the Coronavirus outbreak. pic.twitter.com/jTrEf4WWj0
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 14, 2020
Meanwhile, the WHO has warned that dirty politics over the global health crisis may result in more deaths across the world.
The COVID-19 tracker of the Johns Hopkins University shows that as of today (April 15) there are 2 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the world. However, this is not the correct figure because highly populated countries such as India do not have resources to test and count the actual number of cases.
The Indian government claims that as of today (April 15), the country of 1.4 billion people has only about 12,000 coronavirus cases. However, independent research reports suggest that currently India has more than 1 million people who are infected with coronavirus. But the Indian government is deliberately hiding the truth and giving wrong, negligibly low figures about the disease.
If Trump and global agencies such as the WHO did not take proper action to stop the coronavirus contagion in India, it will continue to pose a serious risk for the entire world during the next many months.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of a humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society. He also creates and publishes a number of digital publications and research reports on different subjects.
