Scott Morrison, Australia's prime minister, has called for expanded powers for the WHO.
Photo: Mark Graham/Bloomberg NewsDays after President Trump said the U.S. would freeze funding for the World Health Organization last month, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison pushed for a revamp of the agency’s mandate to give it powers to investigate potential pandemics similar to weapons inspectors.
The proposal spoke to the failure of efforts in recent decades to overhaul the WHO, even as the outbreaks of yellow fever, SARS, Ebola and now the new coronavirus sparked repeated calls from health experts for an expanded mandate for the agency.
The hope is that the ability to send investigators to a country quickly to probe the source and scope of a public-health crisis would allow the organization to more speedily alert the world about a potential pandemic.
Yet expanding the WHO’s powers would likely be protracted and tortuous. While most countries have benefited economically from globalization, they have been largely unwilling to cede sovereignty to international bodies to tame its risks. Some of the loudest voices advocating inspection powers for the WHO in China have previously opposed giving United Nations bodies such supranational powers over their own countries.
Mr. Morrison’s proposals, shared with U.S. and European leaders, come as geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. cast a shadow over multilateral institutions including the U.N. and the World Trade Organization.
The proposals have so far generated limited momentum. European officials want to focus on dealing with the pandemic for now. A State Department spokesman said the U.S. appreciates “the serious manner in which the Australian government is contemplating this crucial challenge and believe that a range of options should be considered in response to the catastrophic lack of transparency” regarding the coronavirus outbreak.
Earlier
The WHO’s decision-making body last week held its annual meeting and agreed to an independent review of the handling of the pandemic—but little else.
However, some experts say the gravity of the coronavirus crisis could increase powerful countries’ appetite for change.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to turn a crisis into an opportunity,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute of health policy. “If we can’t do it now, we will never do it.”
Despite an overhaul of global health rules following the SARS pandemic early this century, the Geneva-based WHO’s powers pale compared with the mandate of the U.N. atomic agency, which has scores of weapons inspectors.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency regularly inspects civil nuclear work across its member countries. Staff can follow up on any suspected breach of international nuclear rules and report publicly on steps taken to address concerns. In many countries, the agency has rights to visit sites such as university labs or military sites if it suspects illicit nuclear work, under a so-called Additional Protocol agreement.
IAEA work draws on varied information, including satellite monitoring and evidence—sometimes derived from intelligence sources—provided by other governments. The U.S. and Israel have for years provided regular information on the nuclear work of Iran that the agency is obliged to study.
Yet even those powers don’t guarantee success. The IAEA has spent years in cat-and-mouse games with Iran, Iraq and North Korea. IAEA inspectors have been turned away from sites, denied visas and faced harassment, with one detained in Iran last fall. North Korea a decade ago kicked the IAEA out entirely.
Still, the WHO has few of the IAEA’s powers. Changes to its International Health Regulations in 2005 committed WHO members to improving their responsiveness to a potential health emergency and quickly reporting any incidents to the WHO.
But the WHO received no powers to enforce or effectively monitor implementation unilaterally. Despite having offices across the world, the WHO’s staff have no inspection rights in member countries. While they can use open-source, unofficial information—which may have been critical in getting China to finally notify the WHO of the coronavirus emergency—there is no culture among member governments of regularly providing critical intelligence to the WHO.
Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said stronger investigative powers might have enabled the WHO to learn more about the Wuhan outbreak in critical weeks before China eventually notified WHO officials of a cluster of pneumonia coronavirus cases on Dec. 31.
Even after the WHO was notified, it had to negotiate the terms for its staff to make what it describes as a brief field visit to Wuhan on Jan. 20-21, and a fuller fact-finding visit a week later. The health crisis soon overwhelmed WHO member countries, including the U.S.
“It would be wonderful if the WHO was a bit more like the IAEA,” said Charles Kenny, Washington-based senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a research institute focused on development issues. The problem is “not just about legal powers. It’s also about the technical capacity to sift through that information and use it.”
WHO funding has remained essentially flat in real terms for 25 years. That means resources remain scarce for the organization’s emergency-program budget, which has had to battle outbreaks of Ebola in Africa and health crises in war-stricken Yemen and among Rohingya refugees in recent months.
Mr. Gostin, who worked on WHO commissions reviewing the handling of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, said he hopes a speedy review of the coronavirus crisis would galvanize support for an overhaul. The agency’s executive board and secretariat could start working on amendments to international health rules or gather support for a side agreement that could be rubber-stamped in one year, he said.
Mr. Bollyky doubts change will come fast. He fears that fights over potential vaccines could further weaken the mood for compromise amid growing U.S.-China tensions. A review of the WHO’s mandate might come eventually, he says, but major powers are just as likely to create competing health-security mechanisms rather than empower the WHO.
“It’s possible that the WHO continues to exist but real efforts to reform happen in coalitions of the willing, putting together funds and alliances and structures that don’t have multilateral buy-in,” he said.
That points to a deep ambivalence among many world leaders—including Australia’s Mr. Morrison—about handing powers to international bodies they can’t control.
Several months before calling for expanded powers for the WHO, Mr. Morrison spoke publicly against the reflex “towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community. And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”
—Drew Hinshaw contributed to this article.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
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