The only candidate for his succession, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus embodied the international response to COVVI-19 for two years. Target of criticism, it is nonetheless supported by many countries.
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“We are all in this Together.” This January 30, 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has just qualified live the Surgie epidemic in the city of Wuhan , in China, “public health emergency of international scope”. A call to take the measure of the threat. And an implicit way of calling, already, to a form of solidarity between the 194 member states of this UN institution, “all embarked in the same boat”.
Behind his thin glasses, the one we nicknamed “Doctor Tedros”, as in his native Ethiopia, steps on certain words. That of “coronavirus”, in particular, which has been looping in the media and spirits for a few weeks. It will take another month and a half for him to pronounce that of “pandemic”, on March 11, 2020, castigating the inaction of governments to fight against the disease. After that, most Western countries will decide to confine their population.
This Tuesday, May 25, “Doctor Tedros”, 57, is expected to be re -elected for five years at the head of the WHO. Unsurprisingly, since he is the only candidate. This formality will take place during the World Health Assembly, in Geneva.
Five years ago, he became the first African to direct it. The first non-medicine, too, as a community in community health, specialist in malaria. He intended to promote, during his mandate, universal health coverage. But this priority will be swept by the emergence of an unprecedented health crisis in January 2020.
This charismatic man is the first managing director of the WHO to embody the face of this institution so strongly, planted on the heights of Geneva and so little known to the public. At the start of the pandemic, he will intervene every day to take stock of the health situation and deliver recommendations. A performance that will be his signature. Omnipresent on social networks, tirelessly communicating on the state of global health, “Doctor Tedros” will become almost a tutelary figure, despite the controversies that will not stop mark out the management of the crisis by the Geneva organization.
Failed ramp fires, this man is also an instinctive, two features which distinguish him from his predecessors. Margaret Chan, director of the organization from 2007 to 2017, assumed to rely entirely to the member states to decide the policy to be carried out. “Doctor Tedros speaks with a lot of freedom, it is not in the culture of the WHO”, notes German Velasquez, special advisor to the Think Tank South Center, an intergovernmental organization of developed countries installed in Geneva.
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