Research
The WHO Pandemic Agreement adopted in May 2025 explicitly preserves national sovereignty and imposes no coercive powers on member states, making the "power grab" framing largely a distortion — but the deeper problem it attempts to solve is real: COVID-19 cost $13.8 trillion and killed disproportionately even in wealthy, "prepared" nations, while the existing legally binding IHR framework was widely ignored with zero consequences. The central unresolved tension is whether a new agreement can generate compliance that the IHR failed to produce, with Gostin arguing stronger equity norms will shift behavior and Fidler countering that non-compliance with the IHR gives no logical basis for optimism — a disagreement about institutional theory that the agreement's lack of funded implementation plans does nothing to settle. Largely absent from mainstream debate is the Global South critique that the real failure was never too much WHO authority but too little equitable authority, a structural problem the agreement's unresolved Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system and donor-dependent budget leave fundamentally intact.
The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted by the World Health Assembly on 20 May 2025, marking a historic moment for global public health.
Keeping the world safe and protecting the vulnerable are top priorities for WHO's Health Emergencies Programme. We work with countries and partners around ...
Our comparative and case study findings suggest that the politics of centralization and decentralization are important in understanding pandemic response, and ...
Congress should reform the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) so that it can better enforce federal ethics laws, including by: granting OGE the power, under ...
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed persistent weaknesses in global health governance, particularly in preparedness, equity, and accountability.
The WGI draws on perception data from 35 cross-country sources—including household surveys, firm surveys, and expert assessments—to offer a comparable picture ...
The House passed a CR (sometimes also referred to as an extender) that would largely continue current funding levels through November 21, 2025, ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the world. Explore global data and research to understand its impact, spread, and global response.
Still, we see the reported mortality rate as the most reliable proxy for the acute response and the effectiveness of the initial response to the pandemic. Other ...
The World Health Organization (WHO) is in need of reform, say experts quoted in a May 7 Undark article. And achieving those reforms will be a big challenge.
It is the only agency with the authority to develop and implement international health norms and standards and facilitate ongoing dialogue among member states ...
The INB will have to find a balanced path that contains meaningful norms and compliance while still respecting national sovereignty. Read more here. Issues.
Sri Lanka has a long and impressive history of strong leadership and commitment to International Health Regulations (IHR) (2005) compliance and health...
The United States noticed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020 due to the organization's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On 23 January 2020, the Chinese government banned travel to and from Wuhan, enforced strict quarantines in affected regions and initiated a national response.
This perspective provides analyses on historical and contemporary policy trends of vaccine development and immunization programs.
This article examines Sweden's response to the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the more restrictive policies adopted by many other countries. It argues that ...
How does mortality differ across countries? Examining the number of deaths per confirmed case and per 100000 population. A global comparison.
Six events were declared PHEIC between 2007 and 2020: the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, Ebola (West African outbreak 2013–2015, outbreak in Democratic Republic ...
The Pandemic Treaty thus looks to an access and benefit-sharing (ABS) transaction as a way to operationalize equity in global health law.
CCMs address transparency, participation and representation at the country and the global levels and define and correct conflict of interests amongst the ...
The objective of this review is to summarize concepts, frameworks, and approaches used to identify corruption risks and consequences of corruption on health ...
Nearly half of the studies included in this review estimated the effectiveness of stay-at-home orders, 79% of which were found to substantially reduce ...
Decentralised health systems governance may also have negative impacts. For example, poorer local governments may not be able to raise necessary revenues, ...
In the early hours of 16 April 2025, WHO Member States reached consensus on the proposed text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, to be submitted ...
We stress the critical importance of coordination and cooperation, and call for a global network to enhance integrated human health risk resilience.
Duranti shows that British Conservatives were not only concerned about a potential 'totalitarian' (i.e., communist) takeover in Europe but also ...
The Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) originated in 2004 because of the need for emergency medical countermeasures (MCMs) against potential bioterrorist attacks ...
The appointment of the next Director-General will take place at the Eightieth World Health Assembly, due to take place in May 2027.
Such events can be considered false positives, but they are not necessarily failures in early warning. These situations may arise because of the need for ...
In effect, in the Nash Policy Game each government maintains sovereignty over all choices other than its market access choices: but governments enjoy ...
The panellists agreed that the coronavirus crisis has shown that political systems are more centralized than they look on paper. They also ...
Inadequacies in global surveillance drove misperception that the best prepared countries suffered the worst outcomes. Trying to track cases across countries may ...
Despite considerable economic decline in New Zealand, this is significantly lower than countries across western Europe and the Americas, where national disease ...
In addition to placing requirements on states, the IHR obligate WHO to issue temporary recommendations about how states should respond at the border to PHEICs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted vast differences across countries in their responses to the emergency and their capacities to implement public health ...
We examined the approach up to August 2020 taken by two jurisdictions which had successfully eliminated COVID-19 by this time: Taiwan and New Zealand.
The aim of this paper is to investigate coordination bodies as important actors in integrated care, and especially to investigate how the ...
Political legitimacy is a virtue of political institutions and of the decisions—about laws, policies, and candidates for political office—made ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed profound inequalities in country-level capacities for preparedness, detection, and response to health ...
Global governance is necessary to coordinate the global health response. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed deep fissures in global health governance, with ...
We are not aware of any study that has examined public health system centralization and integration in Canada in relation to effective public health emergency ...
This “Preparedness-Response Paradox” reveals just how limited our understanding of how to prepare effectively for crises is.
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