“The WHO’s budget is around the equivalent of a large US hospital, which is utterly incommensurate with its global responsibilities,” said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law professor at Georgetown University. “So, if the US president were a global health leader, he’d be leading a call to at minimum double the WHO budget in the face of this pandemic.”

But the US is far from providing the majority of the WHO’s funds, as Trump claimed, and its voluntary contributions have largely been tied to specific projects. WHO’s total annual budget is about $2.5bn, and contributions from member states have not significantly increased over three decades.

In fact, the US is already about $200 m in arrears in assessed contributions (national membership fees). It has given more in donations, and was the biggest single donor in 2019 – certainly far more than China, which gives a paltry amount given the size of its economy.

Accusing the WHO of giving bad advice, being “China-centric” and even withholding information, Trump claimed to have stopped US funding in a press briefing on Tuesday, only to claim a few minutes later that he was just considering it, pending a review of its performance.

Donald Trump has blamed the World Health Organi zation for failures in the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic , even threatening to cut its funding, but most health experts say it has performed well with limited resources.

“A weak person, a poor leader, takes no responsibility. A weak person blames others. The truth is, from this moment on, Americans must ignore lies and start to listen to scientists and other respected professionals in order to protect ourselves and our loved ones,” the House speaker said.

In a letter to House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi said that the president has had an “incompetent reaction” to the crisis. “Trump is now a disaster, causing the suffering of countless Americans & endangering lives,” she told her colleagues.

“In the middle of a global pandemic, Trump wants to stop funding the preeminent organization in charge of combating global pandemics,” DNC Deputy War Room Director Daniel Wessel said in a statement. “Trump is willing to put global health further at risk to try to deflect blame from his own failures.”

Trump was the only one to answer questions and he grew increasingly combative toward the end. “If you can’t be here, that’s too bad,” said to a reporter who tried to ask a question on behalf of someone who couldn’t attend the briefing due to social distancing requirements.

After claiming total presidential authority yesterday, Trump said state and local officials would follow his guidance. What about officials who resisted? “I’d like to see that person run for election,” the president said yesterday.

Now Trump is saying he won’t pressure governors to reopen their states – fully walking back what he said during yesterday’s briefing.

Fact check: Travel restrictions

Trump has repeatedly touted his travel restrictions as evidence that he reacted early to the coronavirus threat. We’ve addressed this several times on the liveblog over the past few weeks, but here we go again...

The administration’s travel policy did not “cut off” all travel from China, as Trump claims. Although non-US citizens were prohibited from entering the country if they had traveled to China within the previous two weeks, American citizens, permanent residents and their immediate family members were exempt. Similarly, Trump’s European travel restrictions exempted citizens, residents and their families. And initially, the restrictions didn’t apply to the UK and Ireland, as well as most Eastern European countries.



Epidemiologists have told the Guardian that these policies likely had little impact, as they were enacted after the virus was already spreading within the US. “Unfortunately, travel bans sound good,” noted Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, after Trump announced European restrictions. “But we’re way past the point where simply restricting travel is a reasonable response.”

The few studies so far that have investigated the impact of travel restrictions have found that such policies may have at best delayed the spread of disease by a few days or weeks. A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that travel restrictions and airport screenings in several countries “likely slowed the rate of exportation from mainland China to other countries, but are insufficient to contain the global spread of Covid-19. And in China, where officials shut down travel both in and out of Wuhan, the city where the Covid-19 outbreak began, the travel ban barely slowed the spread of diseases, according to a report published in Science.

There is no evidence that travel restrictions significantly reduced the contagion’s death toll.

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Updated at 12.44 EDT