Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov defended the World Health Organization and praised its role as a coordinating body on international health care issues.

"I believe that the World Health Organization, which, under its charter, is obligated to act as a leading and coordinating body on health issues, is fully successful in fulfilling this role," Lavrov said in a television interview today, quoted by Russia Today.

Lavrov added that one should not forget that the World Health Organization is an organization whose activities are defined and implemented by its member states.

Lavrov noted that "until recently, these countries did not find any faults on the organization, complaints or observations."

Lavrov had called on the international community to focus on fighting the outbreak of the Coronavirus, rather than the issue of the United States suspending its funding for the World Health Organization.

"America is the main contributor to the WHO budget, so if we take relative numbers, we find that Americans make up the majority of experts who define the activities of the WHO secretariat, including in senior positions, and I have strong doubts that these Americans work in Total isolation from their government. "

Lavrov's comments came against the backdrop of criticism faced by the United Nations, as US President Donald Trump decided to suspend the payment of financial contributions to the United States to the World Health Organization because of what he called "the organization's mismanagement of the outbreak of the Corona virus."

Earlier this month, Trump announced that his country would end its contributions to the organization's budget, noting that "there are lives lost due to the organization's mismanagement of the Corona virus's health crisis and its over-credibility of information from China, where the disease was transmitted for the first time by animals." To humans. "

"The organisation's mistakes allowed the virus to spread, and it is evolving into a pandemic that has infected millions of people around the world and caused the death of nearly 200,000 people due to the (Covid-19) disease caused by the Coruna virus," Trump said.