Pompeo has been among the administration's most vociferous China critics, and has fallen in line behind President Donald Trump in blaming Beijing for the COVID-19 pandemic.
graphic below. Though China's numbers are disputed, there have been 83,876 confirmed infections and 4,634 deaths.The Trump administration has also directed its ire at the WHO, accusing the United Nations body of pandering to China and failing to ensure Beijing's transparency."It is the World Health Organization's responsibility to achieve that transparency." Pompeo argued."They're not doing it. They need to be held accountable.
Trump has been accused of misrepresenting the WHO's performance during the crisis. The president framed the body as opposing his restrictions on travel from China—measures that were not, as Trump claimed, a total ban—but the organization did not publicly criticize the move. China and Xi have been accused of sitting on the vital information for six days in January, even as millions of people traveled inside China and abroad in the run-up to Lunar New Year.
The president has suggested that WHO teams should have been on the ground in China faster to study the virus. However, China did not agree to allow WHO doctors and epidemiologists to visit the country until mid-February, by which time the outbreak was already well on its way to being a pandemic.
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