It is widely reported that one of the first acts of the incoming Trump administration will be to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). Predictably, responses are divided. US nationalists dislike the growing efforts to turn WHO into some form of world government with authority to dictate health policies to individual states. Against this, a significant element of the biomedical establishment, whether from public health, clinical medicine or allied professional, scientific and social scientific disciplines, are clearly unhappy about the subordination of their expert views of health matters to those of elected politicians. These disagreements have been brought into sharp focus by the attempt to redefine WHO’s role and powers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Is this a dangerous move towards the creation of a cosmopolitan iatrocracy, rule by a rootless caste of biomedical technocrats, or a necessary precaution against some future pandemic that presents a genuinely existential threat to humanity?
…
Maybe the US price for continuing WHO membership should be reform that blocks the aspirations to iatrocracy but retains the organization as an important technical, advisory and monitoring body. Political accountability would properly be located with governments that could take a ‘whole of society view’ rather than focussed on the narrow thinking of a biomedical elite and its allies.