Washington: US President Donald Trump cut off funding to the World Health Organization on Tuesday. He accused the UN body of mishandling the Covid- 19 crisis as Governments grapple with how and when to get their struggling economies back to work.

The deadly Covid- 19 pandemic has already killed more than 125,000 people and infected nearly two million worldwide since it first emerged in China late last year. As the tally of deaths and new infections appears to begin leveling off, world leaders and citizens are fiercely debating when to lift stay-at-home orders.

Trump said he could see “rays of light” on the horizon for the world’s largest economy. He also accused the Geneva-based agency of propagating “false information” and charged that its reliance on Chinese data had “likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide”.

The US contributed $400 million to the WHO last year. UN chief Antonio Guterres said it was not the time to reduce the resources of WHO, in a response to Trump’s remarks he said the organization was “absolutely critical to the world’s efforts to win the war” against the virus. Trump had made no secret of his contempt for what he calls a “China-centric” institution, but his caustic barbs raised hackles — especially when the crisis is far from over.

WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that control measures “must be lifted slowly,” noting that the Covid- 19 was 10 times deadlier than the 2009-10 swine flu outbreak, ‘We are changing the curve’, he said. According to Johns Hopkins University tally the death toll hit a record 2,228 fatalities in 24 hours in the United States on Tuesday.