WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Friday made the following statement in response to President Trump’s announcement that the United States will withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO):

“Leaving the WHO in the middle of a pandemic that is killing 2,000 Americans a day will go down as one of the worst catastrophes of the Trump Administration. There is no way for our country to prevent pandemics from reaching our shores without the WHO. The failure of Trump's travel ban shows that the best way to stop a virus from reaching the U.S. is to stop it abroad first. Now, with this decision, our ability to fight coronavirus and other pandemics has been castrated,” said Murphy. “Today's announcement proves that Trump never cared about reforming the WHO—he never even gave reform a chance. From the start, his attacks on the WHO have been an attempt to deflect blame from his disastrous failure to prevent the virus from killing 100,000 Americans, and now he has taken these attacks to an illogical extreme.”

Murphy continued: “The big winner today is the Chinese government. They will now leap into the void created by the United States withdrawal from the WHO, and seek to become the world's go-to power for global health. China will now write the global public health rules, not the United States. What a nightmare.”

In May, Murphy penned an op-ed in USA Today blasting the Trump administration’s China policy. In the piece, Murphy makes the case that the president tries to act tough on China, but in reality his policies have strengthened Beijing’s hand at every turn. Murphy also penned an op-ed in War On The Rocks making the case that we should empower and strengthen the World Health Organization after the Trump administration halted funding as a way to punish China.

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