US President Donald Trump has said the U.S. will put a hold on funding the World Health Organisation after the UN agency “called every shot wrong” in the lead up the coronavirus pandemic.

During a press conference at the White House, President Trump said, “The World Health Organisation receives vast amounts of money from the United States and we pay for a majority – biggest portion of their money. And they actually disagreed with my travel ban at the time we did it and they were wrong. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things.

“They had a lot of information early and they didn’t want to– they seem to be very China-centric and we have to look into that. So, we’re going to look into it. We give the majority of the money they get, and it’s much more than the $58-million. [That’s] a small portion of what they’ve got over the years.

The president continued: “Sometimes they get much more than that. Sometimes it’s for programs that they’re doing and it’s much bigger numbers and if the program are good, that’s great, as far as we’re concerned. But we want to look into the World Health Organisation because they really are– they called it wrong. They called it wrong. They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known and they should have known. They probably did know, so we’ll be looking into that very carefully.

“And we’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works, but when they call every shot wrong, that’s no good.”