US President Donald Trump has doubled down on his criticism of the World Health Organisation, saying they 'minimised the threat' of coronavirus.

At his White House briefing he said: "The WHO got it wrong, they got up very wrong. In many ways they were wrong. They also minimized the threat very strongly."

He also took aim at the organisation for initally saying there was no human to human transmission in China.

Back in January, WHO tweeted a number of Chinese officials who said there had been no human transmissions. The group later backtracked on the issue and said there had been.

Trump said:  "As you know they made a statement January 14th that there was no human to human transmission - there was."

The President had criticised the organisation earlier this week, tweeting they were 'China-centric' and later saying at his briefing that WHO 'missed the call' on coronavirus.

The White House' economic advisor Peter Navarro waded into the argument on Wednesday night when he hit out at WHO's Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu.

Navarro called him one of China's 'proxies'.

The WHO chief spoke out against the criticism coming from the US, saying it should stop politicising the pandemic 'if you don't want many more body bags'.

Ghebreyesu added: "At the end of the day, the people belong to all political parties. The focus of all political parties should be to save their people, please do not politicize this virus."