The structure of global health governance institutions is not well-designed to adapt to the realities of COVID-19 and other diseases like it.
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Insight: The Pandemic and Global Health Governance
The novel coronavirus caught many world leaders unprepared, despite consistent warnings that a global pandemic was inevitable. And it has revealed the flaws in a global health architecture headed by the World Health Organization. Will there be an overhaul of the WHO when the pandemic is over?
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The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Global Crisis
The pandemic has threatened to rewrite the global order, as China sought to enhance its role on the international stage, while the United States scrambled to rebound from its disastrous initial handling of the pandemic.
The Global Health Governance System
The pandemic has underscored just how dependent global health is on philanthropy. While a donor-dependent global health system may be helpful, it also reduces accountability, and introduces the risk that if a donor’s interest wanes, so will the response.
The Uphill Battle to Reform the WHO
In response to Trump’s attacks on the WHO, governments around the world voiced support for its central role in addressing the coronavirus pandemic. But Trump was not alone in questioning the agency’s reluctance to more aggressively challenge China’s initial response to the outbreak in Wuhan.
Scant information released so far under the watch of Chinese authorities offers little assurance that the WHO’s team will find anything substantial—just as Beijing intends.
For many critics, the repeated incidents of sexual abuse and exploitation of African women and children by outsiders ostensibly deployed to “help” them are a feature, not a bug, of humanitarian and development aid assistance.
