Beijing says Donald Trump ‘shirking responsibility’ to WHO

Beijing on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of smearing China and shirking American obligations to the World Health Organization, after the US president threatened to drag out of the UN well being physique.

The American chief has been locked in a bitter disagreement with Beijing, alleging it lined up the preliminary outbreak in central China late final 12 months earlier than the illness unfold globally, inflicting financial devastation and claiming lives throughout the planet.

Trump on Monday referred to as the WHO a “puppet of China” earlier than tweeting a letter he had despatched to the organisation’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus threatening to make everlasting a short lived freeze on funding from the US.

China in response accused Trump of making an attempt to “smear China” and “shirk responsibility and bargain over its international obligations to the WHO”, overseas ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian mentioned at an everyday press briefing Tuesday.

“The US leader’s open letter you mentioned is full of hints, ‘perhaps’, and ‘maybes’, and tries to use specious methods to mislead the public, and achieve the goals of smearing China’s anti-virus efforts, and shirk responsibility for the United States’ own insufficient response,” Zhao mentioned.

“The US tries to use China as an issue to shirk responsibility and bargain over its international obligations to the WHO. This is a miscalculation and the US has picked the wrong target.”

More than 317,000 individuals have died of COVID-19 out of practically 4.eight million infections worldwide, and governments are scrambling to comprise the virus whereas in search of methods to resuscitate their hammered economies.

Zhao added the US was making an attempt to deflect from its personal “insufficient prevention and control” in opposition to the virus.

With extra fatalities and instances within the United States than another nation by far, under-pressure Trump has blamed the WHO for not doing sufficient to fight its preliminary unfold.

“The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China,” Trump’s letter learn.

China urges the US to “stop shifting the blame” and as an alternative deal with containing the virus, Zhao mentioned at an everyday press convention.

Earlier Monday the WHO mentioned it might launch an impartial evaluation of the response to the coronavirus pandemic, and Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned China helps a “comprehensive evaluation” of the worldwide response to the pandemic after it has been introduced beneath management.

Governments together with the US and Australia had beforehand referred to as for an investigation into the origins of the virus.

But Zhao mentioned Tuesday that the draft movement at present beneath dialogue on the World Health Assembly is “completely different from the so-called ‘independent international inquiry’ into the pandemic previously mentioned by Australia”.

He added that Australia must be prepared to “change its ways” and “completely abandon its political manipulation of the pandemic”.

Beijing has furiously denied US allegations that it performed down the risk, and Xi reiterated on the WHO’s World Health Assembly on Monday that his nation had been “open, transparent and responsible” through the disaster.