Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” former Obama administration deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes accused President Donald Trump of putting American lives at risk by halting funding to the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).

Host Nicolle Wallace said, “So, Ben, not just the World Health Organization, Donald Trump has also sought to blame the Obama administration saying you guys left him bad coronavirus tests, even though coronavirus didn’t exist then.”

Rhodes said, “We left him an office in the White House. He shut it down. He left him a playbook on how do you deal with a pandemic. He ignored that playbook. We did an exercise for his incoming cabinet team about how to respond to a pandemic. He fired almost all of those people. The fact of the matter is, when we had an Ebola outbreak the W.H.O. was slow, guess what, the United States was the strongest powerful country in the world, and we led, we made the W.H.O. work better, and the W.H.O. was absolutely indispensable to getting life-saving equipment and healthcare workers to infected. The W.H.O. is the health infrastructure fighting this pandemic for a lot of countries that don’t have the resources to do it themselves. We’re putting ourselves at risk of cutting this funding. If the disease is raging in one part of the world, it’s going to come back.”

He added, “Our economic chain, factories in countries where we rely on parts for the lifeblood of our economy. Donald Trump is hurting not just the rest of the world but American health security by doing this just so he has someone to blame. It’s outrageous.”

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