President Donald Trump wants an investigation of the World Health Organization, and he might suspend financial support.

Trump’s April 7 comments came after Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner told The Gazette on April 4 of the senator’s long-held desire to investigate the WHO and its director. This week, more Washington Republicans expressed support for an investigation, possible defunding and new WHO leadership.

WHO Director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who goes by “Tedros,” responded to Trump by suggesting the president to stop “politicizing” COVID-19 “if you don’t want many more body bags…”

EDITORIAL: Colorado’s bipartisan battle to save our lives

To demand answers for WHO’s handling of this pandemic is not to politicize anything. It is to seek accountability from the organization, the health arm of the United Nations, that we pay and count on most to protect us from plagues and pandemics.

When word of the virus spread in December, public health officials in the United States and around the globe took the logical approach of depending on the WHO for information and advice. U.S. taxpayers spend more than $550 million a year supporting the WHO, which amounts to about 10% of the agency’s budget.

Here’s what the WHO told the world in a tweet on Jan. 14: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.”

World leaders and their health experts took solace in that. If the disease did not transmit from person to person, it might not spread rapidly around the globe.

As a result of this and other nonscientific, propagandist information given to the WHO by the communist government of China, Dr. Anthony Fauci told Americans not to lose sleep. On Jan. 26, while answering questions on the CATS Roundtable podcast, Fauci said: “The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It’s a very, very low risk to the United States. It isn’t something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about.” (Here it here)

Fauci is an honorable man of science with no agenda beyond public health. He graduated from Cornell Medical School at the top of his class. He is not a politician. He is not intimately familiar with the Chinese government’s lead-with-propaganda practices. He had every reason to trust what WHO reported.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control, agreed with Fauci for those same reasons. He had no cause to distrust the world’s preeminent health agency. Two months later, Redfield explained how China misled everyone. On the March 27 Brian Kilmeade radio show, Redfield explained the Chinese “were pretty certain that this was not transmitted human to human.” (Listen at the 6-minute mark)

Despite the late January assurances from China and WHO that we had little to worry about, Trump issued travel restrictions from China that were heavily criticized.

To Trump’s critics, travel bans made no sense because China and the WHO told us humans weren’t spreading the disease.

“This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia – and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science,” said former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

We should not be surprised by the cozy relationship of Tedros and China’s communist government, or his resistance to warn of a disease. The Washington Post reported in 2017 that China “worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help Tedros defeat the United Kingdom candidate for the WHO job, David Nabarro. Tedros’s victory was also a victory for Beijing…”

Shortly after his appointment, Tedros shocked world leaders by honoring then-Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe as a “goodwill ambassador” to the WHO. Mugabe, a tyrannical communist dictator, caused economic devastation and a multifaceted health care crisis that caused life expectancy to plummet from 62 to 36 in 16 years. Physicians for Human Rights exposed how Mugabe undermined health care to remain in power and covered up viral outbreaks.

“To avoid tarnishing his image at home and abroad,” The Washington Post reported in 2017, Mugabe “neglected to tackle an explosion of epidemics.”

That sounds like China, which kept silent about the virus and tried to downplay its potential. Communists maintain power by managing perceptions.

The Zimbabwe disease secrets also sound like those of Ethiopia, when Dr. Tedros served as the country’s health minister. While Tedros sought his appointment to lead the WHO, The New York Times reported on “a prominent global health expert” accusing Tedros of covering up three Ethiopian cholera epidemics. Other sources corroborated.

Gardner, Trump and a growing list of Washington Republicans are right to want an investigation of the WHO. The world wants answers. The world deserves the truth.