The “World Health Organization” (WHO) held its 77th World Health Assembly (WHA77) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 27 May till 1 June 2024. The theme of this year’s Health Assembly was “All for Health, Health for All”.
The “World Health Assembly” (WHA) is the main decision-making body of the WHO with 194 member states and meets once a year with highly ambitious global goals.
“We are currently working to achieve our “triple billion targets“. The targets are that, by 2025 (from a starting point of 2019), one billion more people will be benefitting from universal health coverage, one billion more people will be better protected from health emergencies, and one billion more people will be enjoying better health and well-being.”
WHO and the WHA – an explainer, 2 June 2024
The WHA77 was very fine and remarkable in many ways. It is wonderful to see that the introduction of the assembly tries to connect health and art & culture with opera singer Farrah El-Dibany performing a special version from John Lennon’s “Imagine” (1971). Inspiring and close to how we think about a healthy & thus sustainable society based on a “Global Democratic Republic”. Also valuable to see the connection between health and sports with the presence of the “Internantional Olympic Committee (IOC)” and stressing the concept of salutogenesis and “health promotion” (instead of “disease treatment”), the open acknowledgment already within the pre-session that “The world is off track to achieve the triple billion targets by 2025“, the courageous “WHO Youth Council” statement to global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity urging for actions and many others.
Within the WHA77 there is a strong spirit for a common global vision, for global collaboration, for international coordination, open and plural discussion & debate based on state-of-the-art insights. There is a clear interest on differentiated aspects and there is a very “healthy understanding” of multilateralism (e.g. “… peace is the medicine …”, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General).
With this spirit, the WHA can be a role model for global democracy, and the WHA77 succeeded to agree on “a package of critical amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR), and made concrete commitments to completing negotiations on a global pandemic agreement within a year, at the latest.” (WHO News release, 1 June 2024)
This is the spirit we would wish for a healthy & thus sustainable society based on a “Global Democratic Republic”.
Only a “healthy lifestyle” can be the “rationality” of global democracy based on “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being …” (WHO constitution) and our wish for an extension with “… and demands ongoing actions towards health and happiness.” The current “World Happiness Report” (see graph “Happiness and Life Satisfaction. Self-reported life satisfaction differs widely between people and between countries. What explains these differences?“, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, first published in 2013, most recent substantive revision February 2024, ourworldindata.org) is a draft for such a political and economical orientation, unfortunately currently based on a vague methodology. This can be improved by the WHO in our view and developed into one of the main global political “management tools”. There is no better orientation for individual lives and global politics than health, including well-being and happiness.
Global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity is the “new global pandemics”
The WHO also understands the importance of global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity and managed to build a connection to “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (UNFCCC) and COP28. To actually speed up “climate actions” and mitigate a humanitarian catastrophe affecting (no thousands, not millions, but) billions of people, we wish the WHO to go into the lead of global climate actions in the way they talk about pandemics (e.g. COVID-19).
The COVID-19 pandemics caused 7,049,617 deaths (https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths, 2 June 2024). This is ca. 7 million deaths in comparison to our currently projected ca. 2 billion deaths due to global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity. And yes, we very much understand, these numbers are rough estimations (heuristic theory) based on numerous assumptions and we hope these scenarios will never come true.
Nevertheless, to get into action it is necessary in our view to tell the people the best possible understanding of the situation and involve them into the decision-making. This will build up and regain trust into politics without any need for populism or nationalism. It certainly needs loads of courage to speak open about the consequences of the past and current political decision-making.
In our view, the discussion about actions to mitigate global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity is a discussion about:
- How many people will loos their livelihood and become refugees till when?
- How many people will have to (directly or indirectly) die till when?
This discussion is at the very heart of the World Health Organization (WHO) and we want them to much stronger involve and push forward the understanding of global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity as the new “COVID-19 Pandemics” with potentially ca. 200 times more “cases”.
We pledge for a global direct democratic vote on climate action with potentially 5,4 billion people (ca. 67% of world population) participating
As long as we talk about global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity in terms of a “business case”, we very likely will come short of significant actions to mitigate the deaths and impacts. There is no price tag for a human life, although we can see a significant correlation/gap between economic well-being and physical, mental & social well-being (e.g. “Life Expectancy”, Saloni Dattani, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Hannah Ritchie, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, ourworldindata.org). Health is highly political and thus, there is no better “morality” with such complex and existential decision-making then plural and as much as possible (grass-roots) democracy in our view.
“No one said multilateralism was easy, but there is no other way.”
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General’s High-Level Welcome at the WHA77, 27 May 2024
As much as we are in favour of the WHO and the WHA, we think there are potential improvements in carrying out such developments. It means the (direct) inclusion of the people with (grass-roots) global democracy. In our view, global democracy can strengthen the importance of health and speed up the mitigation of global warming, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity.