Trump’s attack on the WHO over coronavirus is an incredibly desperate act of international harm

Editorial: Even if the organisation has been wrong on occasion, this is not the moment for it to be starved of money or reformed. This is an emergency. The US president should deal with it accordingly

President Donald Trump speaking at his daily briefing on Tuesday (Stefani Reynolds/Pool)

After a bad day at the office, most might choose to take out their frustrations in the gym, relax with a novel, or settle for a nice cool gin and tonic. Not Donald Trump. When he gets criticised and contradicted he takes it out on the nearest international body – the World Health Organisation. Even if it has been said all too often before, he has gone too far.

Fresh from a new round of accusations that he complacently ignored the coronavirus epidemic (“a fake”) for too long (which he did), that he is acting unconstitutionally to override state governors (which he is) and is being abandoned on this issue by previously reliable friends such as Fox News (at last) he reacted in the only way he knows – by turning on the WHO, the only global agency devoted to public health and the control of pandemics. For low-income countries in particular, this will prove a disaster. Squeezed as they are, the other richer nations must make up the deficit left behind by America’s monumental act of spite.