Donald Trump claims organisation did a ‘very sad job’ and threatens to cut funding

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has bowed to calls from most of its member states to launch an independent investigation into its management of the international response to the coronavirus.
The move comes after weeks of finger-pointing between the US and China over the pandemic, which has killed more than 300,000 people and devastated the global economy.
The comprehensive evaluation, sought by a coalition of African, European and other countries, is intended to review lessons learned from the WHOs coordination of the global response to Covid-19.
But it would stop short of examining contentious issues such as the origins of the new coronavirus.
US president Donald Trump has claimed he has proof suggesting the coronavirus originated in a lab in China, while the scientific community has insisted all evidence to date shows the virus likely jumped into humans from animals.
In Washington on Monday, Mr Trump criticised the WHO for having done a very sad job and said he was considering whether to cut the annual US funding of the body from $450 million (411m) a year to $40 million (36.5m).
They gave us a lot of bad advice, terrible advice, he said. They were wrong so much, always on the side of China.
Later on Monday, Mr Trump tweeted a letter he had sent WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in which the president said the only way forward was if the WHO can actually demonstrate independence from China.
Mr Trump said unless the WHO committed to substantive improvements over the next 30 days he would make his temporary suspension of US funding permanent.
The WHOs normally bureaucratic annual assembly this week has been overshadowed by mutual recriminations and political sniping between the US and China.
Mr Trump has repeatedly attacked the WHO, claiming it helped China conceal the extent of the coronavirus pandemic in its early stages. Several Republican politicians have called on Dr Tedros to resign.
US health and human services secretary Alex Azar said on Monday it was time to be frank about why Covid-19 has spun out of control.
There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed and that failure cost many lives, Mr Azar said.
Speaking hours after Chinese president Xi Jinping announced China would provide $2 billion (1.8bn) to help respond to the outbreak and its economic fallout, Mr Azar said the US had allocated $9 billion (8.2bn) to coronavirus containment efforts around the world.
Dr Tedros said he would launch an independent evaluation of the WHOs response at the earliest appropriate moment alluding to findings published on Monday in a first report by an oversight advisory body commissioned to look into the WHOs response.
The 11-page report raised questions such as whether the WHOs warning system for alerting the world to outbreaks is adequate, and suggested member states might need to reassess the WHOs role in providing travel advice to countries.
In his opening remarks at the WHO meeting, Dr Tedros held firm and sought to focus on the bigger troubles posed by the outbreak, saying we have been humbled by this very small microbe.
This contagion exposes the fault lines, inequalities, injustices and contradictions of our modern world, Dr Tedros said. And geopolitical divisions have been thrown into sharp relief. AP