What COVID-19 revealed about health, human rights, and the WHO

Abstract

As of July 2020, COVID-19 has caused over 600,000 deaths, with 17 million confirmed cases, and counting. The World Health Organization (WHO), the global governance organization charged with providing health for all, declared a pandemic of on March 11, signaling the beginning of the global response to the disease. Despite a commitment to human rights and health, the WHO and others have been virtually silent on how rights and pandemic management go together, and have largely relied on techniques that date back to the 1918 flu epidemic. COVID-19 has made painfully obvious the tension between the protection of public health and the protection of human rights. The “rights-based approach” to health espoused by the WHO needs to be reexamined in light of how public health and human rights may, in times of crisis, work at cross-purposes. We show this through an analysis of the WHO's COVID-19-related publications.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Katie Houston and Laila Khoshkar for research assistance, and to Alexandra Logue for editorial comments.

Notes

1 Due to the evolving nature of the pandemic and public health response, this analysis of the public health and human rights response during COVID-19 is only updated as of August 1, 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs (Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society).

Notes on contributors

Wendy H. Wong

Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science; Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Civil Society; and Research Lead, Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto.

Eileen A. Wong

Eileen A. Wong completed her PhD in molecular virology and microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh, researching immunology of tuberculosis.