“We are all in this together. » This January 30, 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has just described the epidemic that has arisen in the city of Wuhan, China, live.“public health emergency of international concern”. A call to take the measure of the threat. And an implicit way of calling, already, for a form of solidarity between the 194 Member States of this UN institution, “all in the same boat”.
Behind his thin glasses, the one nicknamed “Doctor Tedros”, as in his native Ethiopia, stumbles over certain words. That of “coronavirus”, in particular, which has been looping in the media and in people’s minds for a few weeks now. 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, should 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 lead it. The first non-physician, too, as a community health doctor, malaria specialist. During his tenure, he intended to promote universal health coverage. But this priority will be swept away by the outbreak of an unprecedented health crisis in January 2020.
This charismatic man is the first director general of the WHO to embody so strongly the face of this institution, planted on the heights of Geneva and so unknown 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 continue to mark the management of the crisis by the Geneva organization.
Keen on the limelight, this man is also instinctive, two traits that set him apart from his predecessors. Margaret Chan, director of the organization from 2007 to 2017, assumed to rely entirely on member states to decide on the policy to be pursued. “Doctor Tedros speaks with a lot of freedom, it’s not in the culture of the WHO”, notes German Velasquez, special adviser to the think tank South Centre, an intergovernmental organization of developing countries based in Geneva.
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