Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News on Tuesday that he plans to cut off the United States’ financial support for the World Health Organization until they decide to change their leadership.
“Well, I’m going to take the burden off the president, in the next appropriations bill, there’s not going to be any money for the WHO,” said Graham, chairman of the appropriations subcommittee on state and foreign operations, in response to President Trump openly considering cuts to the agency.
“They’ve been deceptive, they’ve been slow, and they’ve been Chinese apologists. I don’t think they’re a good investment, under the current leadership, for the United States,” Graham told Fox News. “I think it’s in America’s best interest to withhold funding, because they have failed miserably when it comes to the coronavirus.”
According to Politico, the WHO received $122 million from Congress for the 2020 fiscal year, and President Trump has previously announced that this figure would be halved in the upcoming 2021 fiscal year.
Later in the interview, Graham expressed his desire to have China punished for not handling the outbreak properly, and indicated that the United States should bring back the medical supply chain and pressure the country to shut down so-called “wet markets.”
“They silenced people who were trying to warn the world about what happened, so our trading relation needs to change,” said Graham. “The world should send a bill to China; without Chinese misconduct here, there would be no pandemic.”
As The Daily Wire previously reported, during a coronavirus press conference on Tuesday, President Trump said that the United States would consider revoking funds from the WHO in response to the agency’s “China-centric” handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The W.H.O., that’s the World Health Organization, receives vast amounts of money from the United States and we pay for a majority — the biggest portion of their money,” said the president. “They actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it, and they were wrong. They have been wrong about a lot of things. They had a lot of information early and they did not want to divert [from being] very China-centric.”
“We have to look into that. So, we’re going to look into it. We pay for the majority of the money that they get,” said Trump. “We want to look at the World Health Organization, because they really are — they called it wrong. They called it wrong. They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier, they would have known. And they should have known. And they probably did know.”
While President Trump initially said that he was willing to cut off financial support to the WHO, later in the press conference, the president said that his administration would look into cutting off funding to the agency, and he has not yet made a definitive decision.
“I‘m not saying I‘m going to do it, but we are going to look at it,” said the president, reports Politico. “I said we’re going to look at it. We’re going to investigate it, we’re going to look at it. But we will look at ending funding.”