The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee is calling for a bipartisan investigation into China’s initial actions at the early stages of the new coronavirus outbreak and the World Health Organization’s response.
Frustration on Capitol Hill has been mounting over reports that China could have withheld information regarding the outbreak, which began in the Wuhan Province last November, and the WHO’s management of the pandemic, which has been criticized as slow and delayed.
“It is appropriate and necessary for the House Foreign Affairs Committee to investigate the actions by the Chinese Communist Party and the WHO under the leadership of Director-General Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus], especially in the early days of the pandemic,” Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican and ranking member of the panel, said in a statement Tuesday.
His comments come weeks after President Trump announced he would be freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual payments to the United Nations-backed agency while U.S. officials review its role in “mismanaging” the coronavirus crisis.
Global leaders and U.N. officials slammed the move at the time, but many countries said they were not ready to follow Washington’s lead in the middle of a pandemic that has now infected more than 3 million people globally — 1 million in the U.S. alone — and killed over 215,000 around the world.
Mr. McCaul’s Democratic counterpart, Chairman Eliot L. Engel of New York, has launched a formal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s decision to halt WHO funding amid the ongoing pandemic.
The U.S. assessed contribution for 2020 is $120 million, representing 22% of the WHO’s core budget for the year, according to data from USAID. In 2018, the U.S.’s voluntary budget was nearly double its assessed contribution at $220 million.
“I remain hopeful that the majority will join my Republican colleagues and I to conduct this investigation in a fair and impartial manner,” Mr. McCaul said. “If we don’t learn from the mistakes of history, we are doomed to repeat them.”
