The U.S. administration has launched a "faintly preposterous" campaign against the World Health Organization (WHO), aiming to divert attention from its "catastrophic response to COVID-19," British newspaper The Guardian has reported.
"(U.S. President) Donald Trump's assault on the WHO is deeply worrying for global health," wrote Peter Beaumont, a senior reporter on the Guardian's global development desk, in a report on Thursday.
In the past few months, Washington's "untruths and hyperbole" have been dismissed as "iterations of Trumpspeak, whose main purpose has been to distract from the U.S. catastrophic response to COVID-19," the report said.
The United States has reported more than 4.1 million COVID-19 cases with over 145,000 deaths, which are far higher than those in any other country or region, according to the latest Johns Hopkins University tally.
The actions of the White House have shifted from "dodgy dossiers and fake claims" to "a far more sinister agenda," the report said.
The withdrawal of the United States from the WHO reflects what U.S. diplomacy looks like in the Trump era, the report said, mentioning that "It is ugly, dishonest, bullying and cruel, a pathetic trade in self-serving tittle-tattle that damages not only public health around the world, but undermines America's claim to global leadership."
