When the Trump administration, cut ties with WHO in July 2020, it ripped America further away from the leading international health organization, in the middle of a pandemic.
The Biden administration’s policy change to reengage with the World Health Organization and opt into a unified effort to distribute vaccines around the world, is a significant first step. I believe, that by moving quickly on both issues, the new administration has marked a return to a more collaborative approach in addressing a pandemic that has already claimed more than 2 million lives.
Why the world needs the World Health Organisation?
If there is one thing that Covid-19 has made clear, it is that this is not a fight that any one country can hope to singularly engage in and win. It’s a fight that we as a world collectively need to step up to address. Information sharing across borders, with world leaders being on the same page, is needed more than ever.
Ensuring we are all privy to the same information, and responding to the most updated research by some of the world’s leading infectious disease experts, brings us all together on the same platform. That is the central role that the World Health Organization was tasked with at its creation, and it is one that it has executed with precision, in dealing with the many ongoing healthcare crises in the world today.
In the early days of the pandemic, the internet was awash with information about the pandemic. Some of it useful, and some of it false or misleading. Amid this “infodemic”, healthcare workers across the world turned to the WHO, to seek useful guidance that could help save lives. Apart from that, their efforts to mobilize PPE delivery at the height of the pandemic, along with ensuring their Emergency Medical Team were deployed in the hardest-hit areas in Europe and elsewhere, made a difference when it was needed the most.
Cooperation is the key to a fight that concerns us all
Yes, some critics feel that WHO could have acted early, and investigations into how every country could have done better in addressing this virus in its early days, is already underway. But most experts agree on the necessity to provide the WHO with more resources and stable financing, and to extend its authority so that we can safeguard the world from any pandemics in the future.
Like the Biden-Harris administration commented recently, “it is imperative that we learn and build upon important lessons, about how future pandemic events can be averted”. With Dr Fauci, the U.S’s top infectious disease expert, once again heading the U.S. delegation to the WHO’s executive board, we can finally work to stopping the pandemic with a truly global approach.
While just the first step of many needed, the new president’s efforts to rejoin the global effort against COVID-19 highlights his administration’s message of ‘Unity’, turning the leaf to a new chapter, for diplomatic relations across the world.
