AT the opening of the World Health Assembly in Geneva on Tuesday, World Health Organization (WHO) Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus highlighted the need to “build a new global health architecture fit for the future.”
Tedros said the hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks were only the latest crises in a world that is going through “difficult, dangerous and divisive” times.
A rare strain of the hantavirus spread among the passengers and crew of the cruise ship MV Hondius during its Atlantic voyage, killing at least three people.
Just last week, the WHO declared an international emergency as Ebola broke out again in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighboring Uganda.
More than 500 suspected cases and 131 deaths were linked to the deadly virus in the DRC, and two cases and one death were reported in Uganda.
The outbreaks underscored the urgency for rapid international coordination in responding to global health threats. The question the Geneva meeting must confront is whether the WHO can still effectively handle such a task.
The United Nations health agency had come under heavy criticism for the crucial delay in responding to Covid-19. The virus causing it, first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, was already racing across the world by the time the WHO declared it as a pandemic in March 2020.
That’s not all. Faced with a virtually unknown coronavirus variant, the WHO initially issued contradictory advice regarding the wearing of face masks and border closure guidelines.
“Covid-19 exposed the extent to which pandemic preparedness was limited and disjointed, leaving health systems overwhelmed when actually confronted by a fast-moving and exponentially spreading virus,” the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response concluded.
It said the “combination of poor strategic choices, unwillingness to tackle inequalities and an uncoordinated response system allowed the pandemic to trigger a catastrophic human and socioeconomic crisis.”
On the plus side, the WHO led in establishing Covax, the mechanism that speeded up the development of Covid vaccines and enabled doses to be distributed worldwide. It also began work on the Pandemic Agreement, a legally binding framework for equitable access to vaccines and other medical countermeasures, supply chain resilience and transparent data-sharing during future outbreaks.
Acknowledging that Covid-19 exposed “deep vulnerabilities,” the agency last year launched the Strategic Joint Evaluation of the Collective International Development and Humanitarian Assistance Response to Covid-19.
The evaluation is the WHO’s call to action “to confront a simple truth: the next pandemic is not a question of if, but when. What the world chooses to do now will determine how prepared we are when that moment comes.”
The organization, however, was hamstrung by major challenges last year, the biggest of which was severe cuts in funding.
In 2025, the United States announced it was officially withdrawing from the organization. The US has been the WHO’s most generous donor, shelling out as much as $550 million annually in mandatory dues and voluntary funding.
The funding shutdown triggered a $2.5-million budget deficit, forcing the agency to slash allocations for frontline humanitarian programs for HIV/AIDs, maternal and child health, tuberculosis, and malaria.
The participants at this year’s assembly have a lot on the table. They have to finalize the Pandemic Agreement, which has stalled because negotiations are deadlocked over a key annex, the pathogen access and benefit-sharing system. A compromise between wealthy nations and developing countries on equitable vaccines and data remains elusive.
The WHO must also find a way to mesh climate mitigation into global health care delivery and infuse more assistance to economically strapped countries in reinforcing clinics to withstand extreme weather, mapping shifting vector-borne disease zones and tracking the impacts of pollution on health.
It must scale up pathogen surveillance networks to ensure that lessons learned from Covid-19 translate into standard procedure for tracking influenza-related diseases.
Suerie Moon, co-director of the Global Health Center at the Geneva Graduate Institute, believes the WHO had weathered the storm, and that the hantavirus crisis provided “a clear illustration of why the world needs an effective, trusted, impartial, reliably funded WHO.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated changes in the world health architecture. The WHO must build on the momentum of those changes in reshaping its response approach from reactive emergency management to proactive, long-term global resilience.
