The WHO’s poor response to COVID-19
Warning: This article includes my opinion and was written when Donald Trump was in office.
On New Year’s Eve in 2019, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China. Now, around 10 months later, COVID-19 has been contracted by over 37 million people across the world and caused more than 1 million deaths. For many months, people have searched endlessly for reliable information about a potential new virus. Countries were not able to identify that the virus is highly contagious. If the world had found out the virus’ true potential and been able to take appropriate safety precautions, many lives would have been saved. WHO was not able to fulfill its main responsibility: to direct international health and coordinate international health within the United Nations System.
What is the World Health Organization? The WHO is an organization that works closely with the United Nations and is responsible for international public health. The original purpose of this organization was to help with post-war diseases. However, as the world health organization expanded, its responsibilities grew. Now the organization works to improve global health in a plethora of ways including improving access to vaccines, strengthening health care systems, preventing and responding to medical emergencies, and handling major pandemics. The WHO was established on April 7, 1948, which is celebrated as World Health Day. The current headquarters is in Geneva, Switzerland. The director of the world health organization is Dr. Tedros Adhanom. The world health organization gets most of its funding from countries’ membership dues and private organizations that provide funding (like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). A World Health Assembly is held frequently that is attended by representatives by all countries that are members and they determine the policies of the Organization. Since its founding, the world health organization has handled many outbreaks including smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, and many more. However, recently the WHO has been receiving more criticism especially on the mishandling of the swine flu and expense scandals regarding the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Although the WHO has been around for 72 years, they have still not learned from previous mistakes.
Let’s rewind to December 2019. The virus originated from bats in a Wuhan market. Although the details of what happened next are ambiguous, we do know that China reported the virus early on to the World Health Organization. The WHO continuously turned a blind eye to these reports and did not investigate further to see what was happening. By the end of December, the WHO was fully aware that there was a major public health crisis. During this time, a key scientist Dr. Zhang Jixian found out that there was a new novel virus. By this point, the world health organization should have alerted all countries that there was a potential new virus and should have shut down all air travel coming from China. By the next day Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan had all started temperature screenings in airports. On January 5th, the world health organization said,
“[there is] no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission.”
However, there was plenty of contrary evidence from Wuhan and Taiwan scientists. Without doing their research, the organization convinced the rest of the world that these precautions were just an overreaction! Currently, there is an investigation going on to see whether the WHO was so careless in getting the information or whether they didn’t want to upset China by announcing it to the world. The WHO even wrote once that
“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.”
One study shows that by acting more quickly, China could have reduced its infections by 95 percent! The organization could have asked China to allow its team of specialists to investigate the virus but didn’t want to get onto China’s bad side. On January 22, the Chinese Center for Disease Control announced that the virus was “highly contagious.” But the damage had already been done; the virus had reached 12 other Chinese districts and 5 other countries including Singapore, the United State of America, and many more places. Once again the WHO decided to confuse nations by saying that
“[we are] against the application of any restrictions of international traffic” possibly due from pressure from China. After almost a month after the WHO found out about the coronavirus, they finally agreed that the outbreak was a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”
In early February, the United States ignored WHO’s advice that restrictions were counterproductive and would cause social disruption. When Singapore and Australia also banned travelers from China, Dr. Tedros urged nations to lift travel restrictions and said that
“[travel restrictions] can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.”
This statement increased the spread of the virus mainly because poorer countries that are dependent on the support of the WHO did not suspend the flights. Also, allies of China, like Pakistan did not ban international travel until March 21. It wasn’t for another month until the WHO declared the virus a pandemic on March 11, 2020. By that time the virus had spread to over 114 countries all over the world and had infected more than 100,000 people. Then in early April, the WHO once again stated some very inaccurate information. The CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks in public. A few days later the WHO said that healthy people don’t need to wear face masks and that there is no evidence that masks protect one in any way against the coronavirus. Many people trusted the World Health Organization, so they followed its advice causing more people to get the virus. The WHO made lots of mistakes in the previous ten months, all of which have impacted the world greatly.
Now that we’ve looked at the critical flaws, what ideally should the WHO do? The World Health Organization must be ready for future pandemics similar to the one now. Many virologists are suggesting that we are entering the “era of pandemics.” The WHO has been doing a great job supplying poorer countries with doctors, medical resources, and most importantly vaccines. However, they should also invest money in an early warning system for future pandemics similar to COVID-19. Although there are many things we can change about the world health organization, the most prominent one is to reduce the WHO’s responsibilities. There simply is not enough funding to achieve everything. The organization must realign its priorities. Another thing the organization must work on is trying not to be political during a health crisis. The lack of information in the initial spread of the virus was because they were afraid to speak up to China. There are accusations that Dr. Tedros was elected as director with the full support of China, and hence he didn’t want to undermine China. In addition to my last point, I believe that the world health organization should be granted full access to potential sites where an outbreak has started by having international agreements. This way we can prevent making the same mistakes as the handling of COVID-19.
Bill Gates in 2015 gave a Ted Talk about how we are not prepared for our next outbreak. It turns out his prediction was extremely accurate. Gates says there are 3 main problems from the Ebola epidemic: not enough surveillance and data, no medical team, and no one to look at treatment approaches. Even with these known facts, the WHO did not take any action in implementing these ideas. What is the use of a multilateral organization if it cannot fulfill its primary job? The world has suffered tremendously because of this delay and further by some misguided approach to handling pandemic. So for our next pandemic here are the 3 main things we need to implement. Firstly, we need to create a medical reserve corps with trained medical professionals. We must pair these medical experts with the military. This way we can take advantage of the military’s transportation, agility, and speed. Secondly, we need to expand areas in vaccine development and diagnostics. Investing in health companies not only prepares us but also increases global health. If there was a virus, we should get an accurate and detailed timeline of the spread. Unlike the coronavirus, this time we must be quick to respond and start researching the virus at the earliest time possible. Collecting data about potential viruses is a key factor in an early response system. Lastly, creating AI’s to identify spreading viruses will allow the organization to better recognize and pinpoint potential outbreaks. The AI would need to have hospital data that includes information about how many patients have contracted the virus, the number of deaths at the time, the symptoms of the virus, and many more features. AI is a growing and popular technology that can definitely be implemented in the health area as well.
In response to the WHO’s failures, U.S. President Donald Trump defunded the organization which will deeply affect them. Defunding the world health organization is a terrible idea that will affect many poor people. The US funds WHO around 22% of the funding they receive (around 115.8 million dollars). Defunding the organization does not fix the problem. In fact, it makes it even worse! The goal is to raise more money to be more prepared for future pandemics. To execute all the plans I mentioned above, we must need the support and funding of America. The world health organization doesn’t just coordinate international health but it also leads important projects in rural countries. Defunding the WHO will almost certainly strain the organization’s ability to help medical emergencies in African countries. In addition, this would slow down contact tracing and research development toward the creation of a COVID-19 vaccine. The US should retake leadership of multilateral organizations like the WHO and should not leave it to dictatorship and non democratic countries who have vested interest in hiding data.
The COVID-19 pandemic was mishandled by many countries, organizations, and people. However, the WHO’s response was totally unacceptable and harmed millions of people in the process. The next time a pandemic comes around; hopefully, we are prepared and will not make the same mistakes as we did with this international crisis.