 In March the GPEI announced that it had a moral imperative to redeploy some of its anti-polio resources against the COVID-19 pandemic, and recognized that the pandemic would affect its efforts at eradicating polio.They recommended that all mass vaccination efforts, both routine nationwide vaccination campaigns and "cleanup" vaccination targeted at outbreaks, be postponed for several months even though this risks severe detrimental effects on eradication efforts, finding themselves "caught between two terrible situations".Two additional challenges were a conspiracy theory circulating on social media claiming that the polio vaccine contained coronavirus, and threats from President Donald Trump of the United States to cut funding for the World Health Organization.