From the op-ed:
Only a handful of places — including Taiwan, Vietnam and New Zealand — acted in time to contain the coronavirus last year, causing the world to spend trillions of dollars fighting an infection that has led to the deaths of more than 3 million people so far. The World Health Organization shoulders some of the blame. At the least, it should have declared COVID-19 a pandemic weeks sooner than March 11, 2020, which would have underlined the urgency of a global response.
The organization’s failures point up the need to strengthen it. The WHO’s potential was demonstrated by the successes it did have as the world tried to corral the coronavirus. It helped coordinate an incredibly rapid global-learning process around the nature of the virus, testing, treatments and developing vaccines. And it would have accomplished more if it had had greater power to investigate outbreaks, greater resources that a more robust budget could pay for, and a greater ability to support outbreak response and vaccine development.
If we want to prevent the next pandemic, we will need a more powerful WHO.
