WHO Investigation: A Profile of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

People call him "Doctor" but Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is not one – at least not in the classical sense of the term – since he is an academic doctor, having earned a Phd in philosophy, not a degree in medicine. This distinction is not negligible, considering the organization of which he has been director-general for two years, and it can provoke mistrust and disrespect.

This was the case at the beginning of January when was accused of leniency towards China, blindly accepted Beijing's account of cases of atypical pneumonia that they claimed were not transmissible from human to human, were isolated to one region and under control. In terms of diplomacy, one could argue that it was a sound move. Health-wise, it was nothing short of a disaster.

Back in Geneva, the WHO director-general was at it again. Instead of triggering the international alert that would have made it possible to launch an immediate response to the virus, he sent a reassuring message to member states. According to Dr Tedros, everything was under control. On January 23rd, he concluded that China had taken "the measures it deemed appropriate to contain the spread of the coronavirus" and recommended that the confinement decreed by Beijing should be "of short duration," and concluded that, although human-to-human transmission occurred in the country, it "appears to be limited to family groups and health care workers caring for infected patients." He also added that, for the time being, "there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission outside China."

Forced to backpedal

A few days later, amid evidence that the disease had spread beyond mainland China, he was forced to backpedal, and on January 30th came the declaration of a global health emergency. Due to this dallying, a coordinated global response to the emergency was delayed unnecessarily and thousands of lives were likely lost.

Given the strong ties between China and Ethiopia, Dr Tedros' country of origin, but also China's influence on the WHO's finances and its position as the world's leading supplier of medical equipment, there is a strong inclination to interpret this failure as a deliberate desire not to antagonize a partner of choice. In fact, many have expressed this concern quite clearly. Among these is Donald Trump, who recently declared that "the WHO had really screwed up" and accused its director of taking positions that were "very biased in favor of China". There are also two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who in mid-April went so far as to call for his resignation.

So far, at least Dr Tedros has received the backing of his own organization, however mid-May the WHO agreed to hold an independent and impartial of its response to the pandemic. For Dr. Tedros, there's no doubt that he is not out of the woods yet.

Criticism and policies

Instead of reaching consensus, the Ethiopian has earned a reputation for stirring up controversy. This was even before he became head of the WHO. In late 2016, he faced attacks from several Ethiopian doctors who accused him of having concealed three cholera epidemics that occurred in his country while he was Minister of Health between 2006 and 2011, which allegedly deprived his country of international aid, an allegation he denied. However, doubt was sown. Just like the doubt regarding the integrity of his campaign when, in early 2017, he campaigned to succeed Margaret Chan as head of the WHO.

Co-Director of the Health Observatory at the Institute of International Relations (IRIS), Anne Sénéquier takes up the story. "The fact that his campaign was very much focused on social networks earned him a lot of criticism because his critics in Ethiopia did not have access to them and many saw this as a way to silence the opposition," she explains. Subsequently, his election itself was highly contested, many believing that he owed it to good timing. Asia had just been elected for two terms and it was in a way Africa's "turn", as it had never before had a director at the WHO. He had the whole African Union on his side... it opened up a whole new world for him." Many believe that his skills and background have always distanced him from the clinical realities of the issues being discussed.

More of a politician than a doctor

For Anne Senequier, "Tedros thinks like a politician, not like a doctor." This specificity is now seen by many as a serious flaw and could explain why the head of the WHO preferred to favor diplomatic reasoning by accepting Chinese declarations at face value based on the principle of precaution.

But the public-health concern is supposed to take precedence in the face of any suspected pandemic and should have led him to declare a health emergency well before January 30th... She says the man has a master's degree in infectious diseases, but "not clinically, just politically". His work within the Ethiopian government is proof of this. "He has built hospitals and medical schools," says Anne Sénéquier, "there's no denying that. He has done a lot in terms of volume, but not in terms of quality. Everything was underfunded, and for many, this infrastructural push was more political than clinical in the sense that it did not improve the quality of the health care system. And like a politician, the more you attack him, the more he resists," adds the strategic expert.

Aware of his strengths - starting with a keen sense of diplomacy in an institution that is just as diplomatic – and surrounded by a team that he himself has built up and that remains loyal to him, Dr Tedros is standing firm and waiting for the storm to abate.