Coronavirus: Evaluating the World’s Covid-19 Response

The World Health Organization needs greater freedom from politics when it recommends measures to fight global health crises like Covid-19, according to one of the leaders of an independent panel evaluating the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Concerns about reactions to recommendations like potentially trade-disrupting border closures may undermine the global health agency’s ability to fight new health threats, said Helen Clark, both a former prime minister of New Zealand and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, in an interview.

“We expect from the world’s leading global public health authority to offer the best public-health advice that it can,” Clark said. “And that advice needs to be able to be offered in a way that tells ‘truth to power.’ And in a sense, if the ‘power’ doesn’t like it, that’s not WHO’s problem. It must act in what it sees as the best interests of public health.”

Both WHO and many of its member countries have been scrutinized for their responses to the pandemic that has struck about 47 million people, killing more than 1.2 million and stifling economies worldwide. Clark and panel co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia, were tapped in July to review the lessons learned from the WHO-coordinated international health response.

The WHO has been open to their inquiries, and member states have been “responsive,” Clark said. The panel is slated to present its progress to the World Health Assembly on Nov. 10 and release a full report in May.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Bloomberg: The U.S. understood in early January the implications of the novel coronavirus better than most countries outside Asia. Why is it in such difficulty now?

Clark: They were right on to it from an early stage. But, of course, it’s one thing to be right on to it; it’s another to adopt a set of measures that will deal with it. One of the early points of contention is that the U.S., New Zealand and a range of other countries rather quickly implemented travel bans from China. And the WHO, for essentially political reasons, doesn’t endorse or advocate travel bans because it fears it will not get that cooperation from the country that is the subject of them.

Bloomberg: Was New Zealand’s border closure prudent?

Clark: It was an absolutely indispensable measure. As I recall, Auckland Airport was accepting around nine international flights from China a day. If we hadn’t stopped them, it would have been catastrophic. I think as countries start to reopen -- New Zealand, Australia, others that have had reasonable success -- for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be about a “bubble” approach. Having had success and stamping it out and continuing to stamp it out whenever it appears, you don’t want to import cases willy-nilly.

Bloomberg: Will this experience of travel bans and border closures change the way they are perceived as a public-health measure?

Clark: There’s no public-health grounds for saying that they don’t help. It’s all political. But as the evidence shows, it didn’t stop a lot of countries, including my own, putting on travel bans because it was the sensible thing to do.

Bloomberg: Does WHO need to stick to being more of a technical agency, and less political?

Clark: Yes. It needs to be depoliticized. If we could ever get multilateralism right, it needs to be in something like this, where there’s an existential threat that matters to every human being on Earth.

Bloomberg: Will public health be seen differently as a result of Covid-19?

Clark: I think so. It’s clearly not just a health crisis. It’s an economic crisis, a social crisis. It’s a peace and security crisis. The reality is for countries that bungle the public health response, the economic damage is going to be deeper and longer lasting. So getting health right, having a healthy, secure population is absolutely critical to getting economies right and for business to prosper.

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