One day, when the obituaries of Donald J Trump and Tedros Ghebreyesus are finally written, the 6-month period from May to November 2020 will feature prominently as a defining period in their life stories. On the last Friday of May 2020, Donald Trump appeared in the Rose Garden at the White House and announced that the United States would be stopping its funding of the World Health Organisation.
The basis for the decision, was apparently the fact that the WHO had failed to institute the type of reforms that would have helped it contain the spread of the coronavirus across the world. The heart of Trump's argument, was that the WHO should have done more to contain the virus from its purported source - China. At that stage, the question of what the WHO knew and what China disclosed, was still contentious. What was well-known, was that the United States, was already seeing a spread of the virus on its shores that was fast reaching crisis levels.
