Despite former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal announcement in 2020, the United States remains an active member of the World Health Organization. America is also the organization’s largest donor, giving more than $850 million biennially.
Throughout the pandemic, the U.S. has clashed with the organization over travel bans, vaccine inequality, and the investigation into Wuhan’s virology lab.
“It’s been chaotic,” said Dr. Kelley Lee, a global health expert who has consulted for the WHO for more than 30 years. “It’s not the way it should have been. It’s not the way the organization was designed. And the way member states interacted with the WHO during this pandemic has been unprecedented in the sort of tensions that we’ve seen.”
Dr. Lee said, pandemic aside, there’s a lot of necessary work that the WHO does under the radar. The organization is tasked with creating universal names for diseases and variants. The WHO also tracks health trends to build global databases. Additionally, the WHO coordinates international healthcare efforts and has been credited with the development of an ebola vaccine, the eradication of smallpox, and the near eradication of polio.
But the organization isn’t without limitations. The WHO can engage in diplomacy but maintains no legal authority.
“You can read it as global health diplomacy in action, or you can see it as kind of a toothless organization that isn’t able to get its member states to act accordingly,” Dr. Lee said.
During the pandemic, not all of the WHO’s 192 countries, or member states, have been willing to comply with its global protocols. The United States enforced travel bans and vaccine boosters despite condemnation from WHO leadership. And China, also a member state, has ignored calls for transparency surrounding its COVID-19 case numbers and Wuhan lab research. But there is little the WHO can do.
“WHO can ask and ask again. But it cannot, you know, walk into a country and demand and slam its fist on the table or just call out their government for not doing that. There’s no enforcement mechanism. There’s no kind of committee that it can punish a government for not complying,” said Dr. Lee.
The organization also has funding constraints, relying mostly on member donations.
“The organization’s very poorly funded. It has, you know, a budget that’s really comparable to a medium sized hospital…And those resources are stretched very thin across many, many areas of work. I always often describe it as from AIDS to Zika, because there’s everything in between. So it could do more for sure. But it needs resources to do that, and it needs authority.”
Despite the apparent needs and flaws within the organization, Dr. Lee said the world needs the World Health Organization…but with a caveat.
“We need to kind of maybe rename it a ‘Global Health Organization’. Have a fresh start, give it more resources, give it more authority…Going back to your first question, Yes, we still needed WHO, but I don’t know if we need the organization as it is now,” Lee said.
