The WHO (World Health Organization) took center stage during the COVID pandemic as the global coordinator of effective response. Questions about the organization’s proper role – and competence – preceded and now survive the COVID-19 crisis. Was the WHO effective and apolitical in its response, and can it be trusted with its global medical preeminence?
Though bathed in a patina of trust, health agencies have long proven that they can fall victim to the human frailties of error, bureaucratic lethargy, political bias, and hubris. Post-COVID-19, many national interests are pushing to expand the WHO’s authority and funding even more, viewing its faulty responses to the pandemic as justification to allocate more money to shore up those failures. Others take a contrary view, asserting that the organization’s shortcomings during COVID-19 demonstrate intractable problems with no global solution.
Who Is the WHO?
“Public health specialists, non-governmental organisations and some of the WHO’s biggest donors say the organisation is unwieldy, poor at coordinating responses to epidemics, and too thinly spread. And increasingly it struggles to set its own priorities because many of its donors give it money earmarked for specific projects.
“Some experts inside and outside the organisation say those flaws mean the WHO’s lead role in global health is now at risk.”
Many stakeholders have tried to parlay the COVID-19 debacle into an even more significant future power base for the WHO. The organization is pushing to expand its powers, funding, and global oversight of member nations under the pretense of being better positioned to respond more effectively to future pandemics. Questions about virus origins, gain-of-function research, lab safety, vaccine efficacy, and the appropriateness of quarantining healthy people (and children) have caused many legislators and citizens to pause.
Indeed, the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a December 13 hearing titled “Reforming the WHO: Ensuring Global Health Security and Accountability.” Americans must ask: Is the federal government seeking to press the WHO on its competence, or politically rejuvenate it using faux hearings to bolster its legitimacy?
A key question is whether the WHO can ever be indeed “independent” from the winds of national politics. History suggests not, including during the recent experience of COVID-19. The WHO presents itself as an objective medical team that “… encourages the strengthening and expansion of the public health administrations of member nations ….” But that airy-fairy ideal ignores the realities on the political ground.
Myanmar, Syria, and the WHO
“WHO’s failings in Syria are not strictly in the public health sphere, as its cooperation with the Syrian government played an indirect role in shaping the Syrian Civil War. The Syrian government has pursued a military strategy that targets the health of rebels …If WHO were more willing to work with Syrian rebel groups to achieve positive health outcomes, it would avoid playing into Assad’s military strategy.”
The Wuhan WHO?
“… when the pandemic now consuming the world was still gathering force, a Berkeley research scientist named Xiao Qiang was monitoring China’s official statements about a new coronavirus then spreading through Wuhan and noticed something disturbing. Statements made by the World Health Organization, the international body that advises the world on handling health crises, often echoed China’s messages. “Particularly at the beginning, it was shocking when I again and again saw WHO’s [director-general], when he spoke to the press … almost directly quoting what I read on the Chinese government’s statements,” he told me.”
Gaza Strip and Abortion
“[The WHO] calls on Member States, donors and international humanitarian and development actors to provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, and to ensure the allocation of human and financial resources in order to urgently achieve these objectives.”
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is enormous, but is inextricable from the (unmentioned by the WHO) attacks on Israeli citizens. The organization’s pronouncements make that conflict appear one-sided and implicate Israel in Geneva Convention violations. Did the WHO rally resources for Russian civilians as well as Ukrainians?
The WHO also endorses abortion, transgenderism, “equity,” sex education, and questions whether age of consent laws should be adjusted to permit minors to consent to sex despite existing protections. This mission creep now extends to every facet of human life: Human “health” touches everything, and so the WHO has expanded its purview far beyond what was contemplated at its formation in 1948. More voices are calling for restraints on the powers of this organization, even as global efforts are underway to use the failings of the COVID-19 response to grant it even more power over sovereign nations.