The leader of the World Health Organization on Tuesday said he won’t back down from his post despite threats from President Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the group and permanently cut off all funding to the agency.
Mr. Trump posted a 4-page letter to his Twitter feed with the warning Monday evening and gave WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus 30 days to make fundamental reforms. He pointed to a series of missteps and kowtows to China that the WHO had made in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
But Mr. Tedros defended his leadership and said during a virtual assembly of the 187 WHO member nations that “we want accountability more than anyone.”
“We will continue providing strategic leadership to coordinate the global response,” he said.
Calls have been mounting for a thorough probe into the U.N. health organization’s decision-making throughout the crisis and whether it applied enough pressure on China in the early days of the outbreak to provide information and to warn other countries of the dangers to come.
Earlier Monday, the WHO member nations unanimously approved a resolution to launch an independent inquiry into the U.N.-backed agency’s handling of the virus that has infected over 4.8 million worldwide and killed more than 321,000.
• Lauren Toms can be reached at lmeier@washingtontimes.com.
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