In the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again raised the issue of reforms in the World Health Organization Addressing the Heads of Countries at the 2nd Global COVID-19 Summit. The urgent need for reforms to strengthen the global health body and its ability to respond to novel and known disease outbreaks to limit the harm to the global community is beyond debate. long delay and China’s reluctance to share important information promptly and quickly in the subject novel coronavirus, including the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and refusing to allow the global agency to investigate independently and impartially, the origins of the virus, has highlighted the need to strengthen the WHO. But any effort to strengthen the WHO must first begin with an increase in funding mandated by member states. For many years, mandatory contributions have been less than a quarter of the total budget, thus reducing the level of predictability in WHO’s responses; The bulk of the funding is through voluntary contributions. Importantly, it is time to empower the agency to demand that member states comply with the norms and alert the WHO in case of disease outbreaks that cause global harm. Under legally binding international health regulations, member states are expected to have core capabilities to identify, report and respond to public health emergencies. Ironically, member states do not face penalties for non-compliance. This has to change for any meaningful protection from future disease outbreaks.
While Mr Modi is right in calling for reforms in the WHO, the demand for a review of the health agency’s procedures on vaccine approval is far from reality. Covaxin is not the first vaccine in India to be approved by the WHO, and the manufacturer of this vaccine has successfully passed the approval processes without any glitches in the past. The demand for a review of the vaccine approval process is based on the assumption that Covaxin’s emergency use list (EUL) was deliberately delayed by the health agency, which has no basis. That the Technical Advisory Group had regularly sought additional data from the Company only underscores the incompleteness of the data submitted by the Company. As a senior WHO official put it, the deadline for granting an EUL for a vaccine depends “99% on the manufacturers, speed, completeness” of the data. It is naive to believe that the agency was influenced more by media reports than by the data presented by the company; The media was criticizing only the Indian regulator for approving the vaccine, even in the absence of efficacy data. In addition, rolling submissions began in July 2021 after the company completed the final analysis of Phase-3 data. Any reform in WHO should not undermine the already existing vaccine approval process.