President Donald Trump speaks during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Monday, April 6, 2020. Stefani Reynolds | CNP | Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Donald Trump blamed the World Health Organization for getting "every aspect" of the coronavirus pandemic wrong and threatened to withhold funding from the international organization. "They did give us some pretty bad play calling ... with regard to us, they're taking a lot of heat because they didn't want the borders closed, they called it wrong. They really called, I would say, every aspect of it wrong," Trump said at a White House press conference Tuesday. The WHO, the United Nations' health agency, started sounding the alarm on the outbreak of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, China in mid-January, designating the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency on Jan. 30 when there were just 8,200 cases in 18 countries across the world. The coronavirus has since wreaked havoc across the globe, spreading to more than 1.4 million people and killing more than 81,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The WHO's global emergency declaration on Jan. 30 was nearly a month before Trump tweeted that "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA" and six weeks before he declared a national emergency on March 13.

"Viruses know no borders and they don't care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank. So it's really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus," Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of WHO's emergencies program, said at a March 18 news conference when asked about whether Trump's comments were inciting violence against Asians. When WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the coronavirus outbreak a global health emergency on Jan. 30, he urged countries to remain calm and to not impose "measures that unnecessarily interfere with international trade or travel." "This is the time for facts, not fear. This is the time for science, not rumors. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma," he said at the time. A day later, Trump signed an executive order for the U.S. to deny entry to any foreign nationals who had traveled in China within the past two weeks, aside from the immediate family of U.S. citizens.

Trump said he is thinking about withholding funds to the WHO, saying the international agency pushed back on his travel ban from China early in the COVID-19 outbreak. It's unclear how Trump would do this, however. Congress has already authorized $122 million for the WHO for this fiscal year, and while Trump has proposed $58 million in funding for the agency in fiscal year 2021, Congress is unlikely to authorize such a drastic funding cut, especially in the wake of the pandemic. "We're going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO," Trump said. "We will look at ending funding because you know what, they called it wrong." His comments repeated criticism he lobbed against the health organization over Twitter earlier Tuesday. "The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look," he tweeted.