When the nations were engaged in selflessly helping each other out during this hellish time, which was even unimaginable a few months ago, Donald Trump came forward with the imperil announcement of withdrawing the United States membership from the World Health Organization. Though shocking, it wasn’t surprising for the ones who had followed the news dedicatedly since the turn of the century. There is a growing distrust in the world’s leading health institution; just like the United Nations, the autonomous body is clearly losing its credibility with its every step. We have come to a critical moment where the repetitive failures of WHO have grown indicative of its inefficacious functioning and corrupt politics played within the confederacy.
It would be an intelligible decision to deem WHO bootless overnight. The organization was created in goodwill and maintains common standards in global health (though, we have seen the gradual decline). At the outset, the establishment had a hot hand at handling the most outspread morbidity in humans across the globe. From curbing the escalation of communicable diseases to focusing on the improvement of maternal and child health, it has maintained its promise of impartial delivery of global health. It was a welcoming change in the political scene where all hands were on the deck to provide assistance to those who needed it. Nonetheless, WHO saw a roaring run through the 20th century, battling morbidities of all kinds.
Yet it is not incorrect to say that an institution that was created on the grounds of temperance could be infected with bad blood of nasty and corrupt international politics while also having failed to create a general shield to protect the world from plagues, which could have been easily aborted. Since the 1990s, we have seen reports stating WHO’s surly leadership, disagreeable direction, brimming with favoritism, and had something to contribute to everything but health. Its controversial image has followed into the next decades, where we saw the palpable sense of confusion within the global body. It was highly criticized over its mishandling of the swine flu, which garnered widespread fear and confusion around the world. WHO saw no luck in the coming years, where it was put through another wringer to control the spread of Ebola and Zika viruses. Member states condemned the sorry bureaucratic structure, biasness towards developing nations, and budget cuts, which adversely led to the declining conditions of the affected countries. Nations had already started debating on the partial structure of the institution, in which only the highest funding states are favored.
In the recent past, amidst this global pandemic of COVID-19, WHO has lost all its character with constant allegations from countries like the US about its friendly move to cover the mishandling of the threat. We cannot entirely deny the fact that those officials in WHO turned a blind eye to China and had recklessly mismanaged the situation. We can look into the special cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong, which though being in such close proximity to the origin state of the fatal virus, had seemingly driven past the danger without much difficulty. When WHO was still collecting information about the epidemic and studying the behavior of the virus, Taiwan had declared a national emergency and had taken all the measures which WHO would have recommended in a few months. Meanwhile, Hong Kong had concluded their own research and established ‘human-to-human’ transmission of the virus, when the WHO was in denial of any such transmission. This not only shows the crisis in management within the organization but also questions the scientific capabilities of their scientists who took a lazy time to validate their claims.
Though the gaping loopholes are visible to everyone, this is not the correct time to doubt and blame WHO when there is a fatal pandemic rampaging wildly through the globe. Several underdeveloped nations still rely on WHO and cannot battle such widespread diseases without the assistance of a higher guiding authority. It is high time the nations tighten their reins and aim at fixing the institution instead of playing a childlike international blame-game, where nobody is going to benefit at the end of the road.
Written by- Abhay Majhi
Literary Sources: BBC, The Atlantic, The New York Times
Image Sources:
https://unsplash.com/photos/F6LoPfa75tQ
https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/world-health-organization-and-pandemic-politics
