The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2020 31 JB: Do you have any takeaways about the role of the World Health Organization during the Ebola crisis? JK: During the Ebola outbreak we saw some of the worst and, eventually, some of the best of WHO. Early on we saw a combination of downplaying the risk in deference to some of the sensibilities of the affected member states and failing to have the robust emergency team needed—because in the past member states had wanted WHO to play the role of a normative organization rather than an operational organization. WHO’s performance in the later phase of the Ebola response showed their potential and emphasized what they could have done had that posture and capability been institutionalized at the begin- ning of the outbreak. What we then worked on for the next few years—and what I’ve been involved with in a personal capacity since—was a major overhaul within WHO to create a new emergency response team. In the four years since those reforms were passed we’ve seen a really significant transformation. WHO has come in for a lot of criticism during COVID-19, and I think most of it is misplaced. There are shortcomings, one of which is that they are too deferential to member states, which diplomats will recognize is simply how we’ve built the multilateral system today. Every U.N. institution is deferential to its member states, and that is by design because that is how the member states have traditionally wanted it. Within the parameters allowed it by the member states, WHO’s been pretty accurate. Within three weeks of the notifi- cation of this novel disease no one knew anything about, they were able to provide a pretty reliable characterization of the virus, how transmissible it was, how dangerous it was—and it holds up pretty well now. WHO has also done a lot of opera- tional work they would not have been capable of years ago. For instance, they’ve set up an air bridge to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for the developing world in part- nership with the World Food Programme’s logistics capabilities and UNICEF’s procurement capabilities. That sort of partner- ship would not have been something WHO would have been involved with five years ago.