The leader of a national Hispanic church body has come out in support of Donald Trump's attack on the World Health Organization (WHO).
Trump said on Monday that the US would be stopping payments to WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The US, one of the biggest financial contributors to WHO, leads other countries worldwide with the number of infected. As of Thursday, it has nearly 640,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 30,900 deaths.
Trump said that the global health body had "failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable".
Rev Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), welcomed Trump's decision.
"I applaud the president's decision to hold the World Health Organization to account for its apparent mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis, even as it has brazenly parroted Chinese propaganda," he said.
"It is gravely immoral for an international body like WHO to conduct itself as it has; its leadership owes the world answers, now."
The NHCLC has 40,000 member churches in the US, as well as chapters in Latin America.
Rev Rodriguez went on to reject comments from the Chinese ambassador to the US in a New York Times editorial claiming that the criticism was about race.
"Of course, every actual case of xenophobia and racism must be vigorously condemned and no one should treat the Chinese people or Asian Americans unkindly for the vices of the CCP, but the power of these words should not be diminished by their misuse in an attempt to score political points against a political nemesis," Rev Rodriguez said.
"It is not racist to call out the malfeasance of WHO, which has cost lives, in subservience to the Chinese Communist Party which has cost many more lives because of Covid-19, and (before it) by the internment of the Uighurs, the persecution of journalists and religious leaders, the forced disappearance of dissidents, and, most recently, by enabling overt racism against immigrants of color in cities like Guangzhou."
