WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senators Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Thom Tillis, Steve Daines and Kevin Cramer sent a letter to Senate Appropriations Committee leadership requesting that any funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) be withheld pending a Congressional hearing to investigate the WHO’s role in helping Communist China cover up information regarding the threat of the Coronavirus.

Read the Senators’ letter HERE or below.

April 24, 2020

Dear Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Leahy:

As you begin drafting the Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 State, Foreign Operations, and Related Agencies appropriations bill, we urge you to condition funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) on its full and complete cooperation with Congress’s review and investigation of its response to the deadly novel Coronavirus, COVID-19. We respectfully request that these conditions allow funding for the WHO to be reduced or eliminated for FY 2021 if it fails to cooperate with Congress or the Administration so that this money may instead be redirected to other domestic and international healthcare programs and organizations.

The world is facing an unprecedented public health crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the solution requires the cooperation of all nations across the globe. Since 1948, the world has placed its trust in the WHO to serve as a global leader. Unfortunately, the WHO’s leadership seems to have failed their mission to protect the global community from COVID-19, because they appear to have uncritically accepted false and misleading information provided by the Chinese Communist Party. The WHO’s reliance on and dissemination of this Chinese disinformation seems to have needlessly worsened a pandemic that has infected millions worldwide, cost tens of thousands of American lives, and upended the American and world economies.

The United States is the largest contributor to the WHO, contributing more than $1.5 billion since 2016. Congress appropriated this money with the understanding that the WHO would focus on advancements in world health. American taxpayers cannot continue to fund an organization that seems to have misled the world about this pandemic and continues to act beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, counter to the interests of global health security.  These are gravely serious issues that must be addressed with complete transparency so that the American people and the world understand what the WHO did and did not do in response to the outbreak of COVID-19.  The American people deserve answers, and the world deserves a global health organization truly and unwaveringly dedicated to global health.

For these reasons, we are supportive of President Trump’s decision to withhold WHO funding pending his Administration’s review of its COVID-19 response, and we will continue to support that decision unless and until the WHO agrees to cooperate fully and completely with Congress and the Administration. Congress must ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent in the best interest of Americans. Congress cannot continue to blindly appropriate funds to the WHO without assuring itself that any mistakes made during this outbreak will be identified and corrected. 

Sincerely,

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