After the novel coronavirus first emerged late last year in Wuhan, China, its combination of transmissibility and lethality brought the world to a virtual standstill. Governments restricted movement, closed borders and froze economic activity in a desperate attempt to curb the spread of the virus. At best, they partially succeeded at slowing down the first wave, with the second wave experts warned about now upon us. According to official records so far, more than 103 million people worldwide have been infected, and more than 2.2 million have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The actual toll of the virus is far worse and will continue to climb.
Governments will now have to balance the need to resume economic activity with measures that limit the virus’s spread until a vaccine is discovered and distributed—an outcome that is still months away, at best, despite promising test results from rapidly developed vaccine candidates. How they attempt to resolve that tension could have implications for how long they remain in power.
The novel coronavirus caught many world leaders unprepared, despite consistent warnings that a global pandemic was inevitable. And it has revealed the flaws in a global health architecture headed by the World Health Organization, which had already been faulted for its response to the 2014 Ebola pandemic in West Africa. But the WHO has also been intentionally hobbled by member states in how aggressively it can react to public health crises out of concerns over sovereignty.
In the case of COVID-19, the agency became a political punching bag for former U.S. President Donald Trump as he looked to deflect criticism of his own response to the pandemic. Trump repeatedly echoed accusations that the WHO initially downplayed the severity of the virus in deference to Beijing. But given the WHO’s dependence on cooperation from member states, it is unclear what the agency could realistically have done differently. Trump subsequently heightened tensions between the United States and its long-time Western allies when he froze U.S. funding for the WHO. And in July, his administration formally announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the body effective July 6, 2021. That move has already been reversed by President Joe Biden, who has also promised to work more closely with the WHO moving forward.
The pandemic has also underscored the global health infrastructure’s inequalities, as poorer nations were outbid for critical medical equipment by developed countries in the early days of the pandemic’s spread. Now they are facing similar obstacles when it comes to gaining access to vaccines. And to the extent that it has diverted attention and potentially funding from responses to other public health concerns, including food security and other infectious diseases, the death toll could be compounded.
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