NEWSSCIENCE sciencemag.org 14 FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6479 731
have profound effects on public health.
Meanwhile, multilateral organizations like
WHO are under fire from populists and na-
tionalists. “All the global trends are against
what WHO was founded for,” Gostin says.
“The organization in the year 2020 is in the
middle of a hurricane, hunkering down.”
TEDROS’S FIRST MEMORIES of WHO are from
a more hopeful time. Growing up in Asmara,
then part of Ethiopia and now the capital of
Eritrea, he saw posters advertising WHO’s
global campaign to eradicate smallpox—a
landmark public health feat accomplished
in 1980. After studying biology and work-
ing in public health, Tedros received a WHO
scholarship to study at the London School of
Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
He obtained a Ph.D. in community health,
went back to Ethiopia to head a regional
health bureau, and rose to minister of health.
During his tenure, from 2005 to 2012, he is
credited with building up a network of more
than 40,000 female health workers in rural
areas who dispense malaria drugs, immu-
nize children, and care for pregnant women.
Deaths from AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis
dropped by more than half on his watch. Af-
ter 4 years as Ethiopia’s minister of foreign
affairs, Tedros ran for the position of WHO’s
director-general in 2017, with backing from
the African Union.
Tedros put universal health coverage
at the heart of his campaign. He first had
health insurance, a luxury unavailable to
him in Ethiopia, while studying in Denmark
for 4 months in 1988. But he believes coun-
tries with few resources can offer universal
coverage as well—even if they can only afford
to offer basic care. “Half of the world’s popu-
lation doesn’t have access to essential health
services. I just refuse to accept that,” he says.
Tedros beat the United Kingdom’s David
Nabarro with support from 133 out of
186 member states in the final voting round.
Halfway into his first 5-year term, he occu-
pies a spacious office on the seventh floor of
WHO’s headquarters here. Presents from vis-
iting dignitaries are on display: a traditional
white hat from Afghanistan, a miniature
wooden boat from Tuvalu, a little lighthouse
from the Maldives. But when Science visited
in December 2019, Tedros described a darker
world. Violence was surging in the DRC;Ebola, almost under control, was spreading
again; and health workers were still being
attacked. The evening before, he had had
a strategy call with U.N. Secretary-General
António Guterres. “The most important
thing now is security,” Tedros said.
A very different virus was occupying him,
too: the misinformation about vaccines
spread through social media. The day before,
WHO had released the number of deaths in
2018 from measles, a disease for which cheap
and effective vaccines exist: 144,000, a 14%
increase from 2017. “This is crisis level al-
ready, and Facebook and Twitter or other so-
cial media groups should really understand
this,” Tedros said. He said he has asked social
media giants to do more to fight false infor-
mation. (Today, WHO has started to work
with the companies to flag misinformation
and rumors about COVID-19 and direct us-
ers to WHO’s website.)
During his tenure so far, Tedros has been
willing to take risks—and not just by taking
a dozen trips to the Ebola battlefield. One of
his first moves was to name Zimbabwe’s long-
time dictator Robert Mugabe a WHO “good-
will ambassador.” Tedros says the suggestionPublished by AAAS