A medical worker puts on protective equipment in Houston, Texas, which is facing an acute shortage of intensive care unit beds amid Coronavirus surge (Reuters)

In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump withdraws the US from the World Health Organization and berates the White House’s top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

On Wednesday, daily confirmed cases set a 7th record within two weeks. They increased 60,021 to 2,996,098. Infections are up in 46 of 50 states, with surges of more than 70% in 14 of them.

The US death toll from the virus is now 131,480, a rise of 1,195 in 24 hours.

But Trump, challenged over his mismanagement of the crisis, has campaigned to blame the WHO. He and his advisors have falsely accused it of collaborating with China to cover up the virus.

In mid-April, only 24 hours after he failed to claim “total power” in the US system, Trump halted the American contribution of about $400 million to the WHO’s $4.8 billion annual budget.

On Tuesday, the White House sent the formal notification of withdrawal to Congress.

Medical and public health experts, as well as legislators, denounced Trump’s move. Elizabeth Cousens, President of the United Nations Foundation, said the withdrawal is “shortsighted, unnecessary, and unequivocally dangerous”.

Lawrence Gostin, the director of the WHO’s Collaborating Center on National & Global Health Law, echoed:

Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, assessed:

To withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization at the height of a global pandemic that has already killed more than 133,000 Americans is self-defeating and dangerous.

Not only will this withdrawal hurt global efforts to develop and deploy critical vaccines, but it will also remove our ability to have a say in the operations and future of that organization, yielding much influence to China.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Subcommittee overseeing multilateral institutions, explained:

Cutting the United States out of the WHO in the middle of the worst global pandemic in a century makes Americans more vulnerable. By abandoning the efforts to control the virus abroad, we’re ensuring that far more Americans will get sick, either through foreign travelers coming to the US, or through Americans traveling abroad.

Trump: Medical Expert Fauci is Wrong

Trump continued his denial of the pandemic’s threat on Tuesday while belittling Dr. Fauci.

Fauci has been sidelined from US television by the Trump Administration. However, he has used testimony in Congressional hearings, webcasts, and interviews with foreign media to summarize that “the current state is really not good” with the US “still in the first wave” and the prospect of a “very disturbing” death total.

See TrumpWatch, Day 1,258: Fauci — Coronavirus Death Toll Will Be “Very Disturbing”

Trump, who said last week that the virus “will sort of just disappear” and falsely said that it is 99% safe to be infected, told interviewer Greta van Susteren:

I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him.

Dr. Fauci said don’t wear masks and now he says wear them. And he said numerous things. Don’t close off China. Don’t ban China. I did it anyway. I didn’t listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape.

We’ve done a good job. I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks, by the time we next speak, I think we’re going to be in very good shape.

Earlier in the day, Fauci said in a Facebook Live interview with National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins.

We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this. And I would say, this would not be considered a wave. It was a surge, or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline.

Comparing the US to Europe, he explained how Trump’s demand for the “reopening” of the US, made soon after the White House put out stay-at-home and social-distancing guidelines on March 16, had fueled the record number of infections.

The European Union as an entity, it went up and then came down to baseline….We went up, never came down to baseline, and now it’s surging back up. So it’s a serious situation that we have to address immediately.

In a livestream alongside Sen. Doug Jones, Fauci chided Trump’s proclamation of a “tenfold” fall in the death rate as a “false narrative”.

At the end of the Facebook Live interview, he offered a bit of hope — if politics does not stand in the way — “Science will get us through this. Hang in there, it will end.”