COVID & the WHO
The World Health Organization and the Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: How the WHO failed and why it doesn’t matter
Elizabeth Good
As COVID-19 remade the world in 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) came to occupy center-stage as the global institution with a mandate to deal with pandemics. How did it perform? In this paper — published as part of the Global Governance in the Age of COVID research project at the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies, Northwestern University — Elizabeth Good, Project Assistant for Global Governance in the Age of COVID, examines the WHO’s mixed results in response to Covid-19: some success, some failure, and many lessons on the limits of governments and global governance.