President Trump’s announcement that the United States would be cutting funding to the World Health Organization has sparked controversy across the political landscape. Left and right wing pundits have been quick to criticize the President’s, and the World Health Organization’s actions respectively.

NPR published an article entitled ‘We Alerted The World’ To Coronavirus On Jan. 5, WHO Says In Response To U.S’. Within the article Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme is quoted:

“We alerted the world on January the 5th,” Dr Ryan said. “Systems around the world, including the U.S., began to activate their incident management systems on January the 6th. And through the next number of weeks, we’ve produced multiple updates to countries, including briefing multiple governments, multiple scientists around the world, on the developing situation, and that is what it was, a developing situation.”

Dr. Ryan’s claims that WHO was warning the world of the impending pandemic on January 5th, calls into question statements which were later issued by the World Health Organization.

For example, in an article published to Reuters on February 3rd, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade”. This statement made days after President Trump implemented the initial travel ban with China on January 31st.

In addition, the World Heath Organization said in a tweet on January 14th, there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”, taking China at their word.