One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has slammed the World Health Organisation as “a waste of money”, saying Prime Minister Scott Morrison should withdraw Australia’s funding to the international public health agency.
Speaking on Sky News’s Paul Murray Live, Hanson said Morrison should “save our $66 million and get out it”.
“I don’t trust [the WHO], I don’t think that we need to be involved in this,” Hanson said.
Hanson’s comment came after US President Donald Trump announced US funding to the WHO would be put on hold in a decision that has been criticised as a “crime against humanity” amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump’s decision came following sustained criticism of his handling of the epidemic, which has killed more than 30,000 people in the US as of Wednesday.
The approval rates on Trump’s management of the outbreak dipped from 53 per cent in March to 47 per cent as of last week, a CBS News poll found. Trump has been condemned for using federal resources, including supply of emergency medical equipment, to “advance his personal political agenda” and threaten Democratic governors.
Trump has previously accused the WHO of mismanaging the spread of the coronavirus and not acting quickly enough to investigate the virus when it first emerged in China in December 2019.
The UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said it was “not the time” to cut funding to the WHO, which was “absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war against COVID-19”.
“Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis,” he said.
“But now is not that time … It is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organisation or any other humanitarian organisation in the fight against the virus.”
Laurie Garrett, a former senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations said the WHO “is the only lifeline most African, Latin American and Asia Pacific nations have”.
Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal described Trump’s decision as “a crime against humanity”.
Horton wrote: “Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”
Since it was founded in 1948, the WHO has helped eradicate smallpox and reduced polio cases by 99 per cent.
The US is the largest donor out of all countries, providing the agency US$893 million in the two-year period of 2018 to 2019.
