Ebola Is Making A Comeback
On Sunday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC) the second-highest alarm the agency can sound. The outbreak, driven by the rare Bundibugyo strain, has already killed more than 80 people among 336 suspected cases, yet there is no approved vaccine and no specific treatment. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the situation “extraordinary,” citing “a four‑week detection delay” and “extensive uncontrolled community transmission.”
On the surface, this declaration is the WHO doing what it was created to do: raising a global red flag when a pathogen threatens to cross borders. But for those who watched the agency stumble through the COVID-19 pandemic and the West African Ebola disaster before that the alarm invites a more troubling question: Can the WHO still be trusted, or is this just another case of too little, too late from an institution that has lost its credibility?
The COVID-19 Backstory: A Litany of Failures
To judge today’s declaration, one must first revisit the pandemic that shattered the WHO’s reputation. A 2025 scoping review published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications catalogued the critiques: “delays in response, communication failures, vaccine equity, global coordination, governance limitations, and trust and transparency.” Each of those abstract categories translates into real-world harm.
The agency advised the public not to wear masks for months, insisting there was insufficient evidence of benefit, and it repeatedly played down airborne transmission even as a growing body of science pointed to the opposite. Oxford’s Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, who sits on several WHO expert committees, put it bluntly: “Without a doubt, WHO’s failure to endorse masks earlier cost lives.” The mask and aerosol stumbles were not mere academic quibbles; they shaped national policies, delayed mitigation measures, and helped the virus spread unchecked.
Meanwhile, the WHO waited until 11 March 2020 when almost 120,000 cases had already been confirmed to declare COVID-19 a pandemic. By then the virus was entrenched in Europe and North America. Critics argue the delay was not accidental; it was political. “The agency has been accused of delaying sounding the alarm for fear of offending Beijing,” one analysis notes, “and for failing to coordinate a coherent international response.”
Political Interference and the China Shadow
The reluctance to confront China remains the deepest stain on the WHO’s COVID-19 record. Throughout 2020, the agency repeatedly praised China’s “transparent” response even though private recordings later revealed that senior officials were “frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.” When a WHO-led team visited Wuhan in 2021 to investigate the virus’s origins, it failed to dismiss China’s fringe theory that the virus might have been spread via frozen seafood.
“The WHO never really criticised China for its handling of Covid,” observed one analysis, “but is often quick to criticise the U.S.” That perception of double standards prompted the United States under President Donald Trump to formally withdraw from the organization in January 2026, citing the WHO’s “failure to demonstrate independence from inappropriate political influence.” The U.S., which had been the agency’s largest funder, argued that China’s outsized sway had rendered the WHO incapable of honest reckoning.
Even Tedros himself has been dogged by accusations of pro-China bias. In 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged without presenting public evidence that China “bought” Tedros’s 2017 election. Tedros dismissed the claim as “untrue and unacceptable,” but the charge has never fully gone away. More recently, U.S. officials pressed for Tedros’s removal ahead of the May 2026 World Health Assembly, citing his “bias towards China” a move African ambassadors condemned as having an “unfortunate racial undertone.”
The Taiwan Episode: A Microcosm of WHO Politicisation
Few incidents illustrate the WHO’s political entanglement more starkly than its treatment of Taiwan. On 31 December 2019, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control became aware of atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan. The same day, it emailed the WHO to request information. When Washington later cited this as proof that Taiwan had issued an early warning and that the WHO had “pretended Taiwan didn’t exist” the WHO’s technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove retorted that Taiwan had “not warned us” but “just asked for information.” Taiwan’s foreign ministry produced the email as evidence to the contrary.
Whatever the email’s precise wording, the episode exposed a deeper problem: the WHO allowed geopolitical considerations specifically, deference to Beijing’s “One China” policy to determine who could sit at the table during a burgeoning pandemic. When an agency chooses political expediency over inclusive surveillance, every country is less safe, and the seeds of future distrust are sown.
Institutional Amnesia? Learning (or Not) from Ebola
To be fair, the WHO does not always fail. During the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in DRC, the agency helped roll out vaccines and treatments for the Zaire strain, and for the first time “every patient was offered voluntary and equitable access to groundbreaking treatments.” That outbreak was contained after 22 months.
But the current crisis echoes the darker legacy of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, when the WHO was excoriated for “unnecessary bureaucracy” and a failure to “see some fairly plain writing on the wall.” Aid agencies had warned of an unprecedented outbreak in June 2014, yet the WHO did not declare an emergency until August by which time almost 1,000 people had died. Co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, Dr. Peter Piot, agreed the agency “acted far too slowly.”
Fast-forward to May 2026. The first symptomatic Bundibugyo case dates to 24 April, meaning the virus spread for roughly four weeks before the international alert went up. The WHO itself admits “there are significant uncertainties to the true number of infected persons and geographic spread.” In other words, the world is playing catch‑up again.
A Crisis of Trust
Public faith in the WHO has eroded sharply. Social-media analysis shows that the agency’s “popular legitimacy” was stable from 2008 to 2019 but “declined significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The retweet‑to‑reply ratio on the WHO’s X account “plummeted through 2021,” signalling a surge in dissent and scrutiny. This is not a fringe phenomenon: it reflects a global legitimacy crisis that spans countries and political systems.
When trust evaporates, declarations of emergency lose their power. Governments hesitate to act on WHO advice; citizens ignore it. The Bundibugyo PHEIC is meant to “mobilise international funding, coordination and emergency response efforts.” Yet if member states view the WHO as a politically compromised, scientifically sluggish body, will they open their wallets and coordinate as urgently as needed?
Can They Be Trusted?
The WHO remains indispensable in many respects. It sets global health standards, coordinates vaccine distribution, and runs surveillance networks that no single country can replicate. The 2018 DRC response shows that, when adequately resourced and insulated from geopolitics, it can still deliver.
But trust is not a blanket endorsement; it is earned through consistent, transparent, and apolitical action precisely the qualities the WHO has repeatedly failed to demonstrate. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed an agency too timid to challenge powerful member states, too slow to correct its own scientific misjudgements, and too willing to sacrifice inclusivity on the altar of Beijing’s sensitivities. The Bundibugyo emergency is testing whether those patterns persist.
Tedros said this week that “peace is the best medicine.” That is an admirable sentiment but peace must also reign inside the organization he leads. Until the WHO can prove it is guided by science alone and not by the political interests of its largest donors or most authoritarian members, the question of trust will hang over every emergency declaration it makes. The world can only hope that this time, the price of that uncertainty is not measured in thousands of lives.
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