Nikki Haley, the Trump administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations, blasted the U.N.-based World Health Organization for taking China’s word about the potential dangers and transmissibility of the coronavirus.
“Taiwan told them December 31st: We have evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Haley told Fox News on Monday, reported The Washington Examiner. “Then they came out two weeks later and they said that there was none of the human-to-human transmission. “
“They didn’t decide until the end of the month that maybe they needed to say that this could be a health emergency,” said Haley. “All while saying you don’t need to stop trade, saying you don’t need to stop travel, and criticizing the president when he, up-front, decided to stop that travel.”
To address the problems at the World Health Organization, Haley has agreed with President Donald Trump’s call to withhold money for the agency until appropriate changes have been made and the health agency is held accountable for its actions.
“I think that there’s serious reforms that need to be done here, and I think the president’s right to say we’re going to withhold money until we get some accountability” said Haley. “Having worked with many of these UN agencies, they don’t like being told what to do but they always have their hand out waiting for the money.”
“At the end of the day, our citizens deserve to know that they’re getting a return on the investment,” said the former U.N. ambassador. “You had the World Health Organization wrongly get out there and put out information that protected China, and did not give the information that told what Taiwan had.”
According to Reuters, Taiwanese Health Minister Chen Shi-Chung emailed the World Health Organization on December 31, asking for more information about the mysterious cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China.
In the email, Shi-Chung noted that early media reports have indicated that the patients have been isolated, and health experts do not yet know what has been causing the pneumonia, reported the news agency.
The WHO told Reuters that the email didn’t mention human-to-human transmission, prompting Shi-Chung to note that the U.N.-based agency was playing word games: “If being treated in isolation is not a warning, then what is?”
On January 14, the World Health Organization suggested that the coronavirus could not spread between humans. China acknowledged that the coronavirus could spread between humans one week later.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Trump blasted the WHO earlier this month for the health agency’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, and indicated that he would consider defunding them as a response
“They called it wrong. They really — they missed the call. And we’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it and we’re going to see,” said Trump at a coronavirus briefing last week. “I’m not saying I’m going to do it, but we are going to look at it.”