The World Health Organization (WHO) Secretary General Tan Desai intends to seek re-election after his term expires next year, the U.S. health news website Stat News revealed on March 3.
The newspaper cited sources familiar with the matter as saying that Tan Desai, 56, who was born in Ethiopia, became the first African-American to be elected WHO secretary-general in 2017, and that he intends to seek another term when his term expires next year. The WHO holds elections for its secretary-general every five years, and the current secretary-general can run for one more term.
Although Tandezai has been tight-lipped about whether to seek re-election, he reportedly does intend to do so, and it is unclear at this stage whether anyone else is willing to challenge. The newspaper said that if Tandezai is confirmed to run, it will be a test of his leadership in the fight against the disease.
Since Tan took over at WHO, the world has faced several major health emergencies, including the 2018 outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which took two years to contain. However, before Ebola was completely eradicated, the world was then plunged into a larger outbreak of Wuhan pneumonia (novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19).
Tandse received much praise for his response to the Ebola outbreak by personally traveling to the danger zone at least 10 times to meet with frontline health care workers. However, when a large number of unidentified pneumonia cases first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019 and gradually spread across China, Tandezai was frequently accused of singing the same tune as the Chinese government and failing to keep abreast of the actual situation of the virus and the outbreak, causing countries to miss the golden period of epidemic prevention and almost perishing amid global calls for his ouster.
However, after the WHO’s international expert team visited Wuhan, China, in February to investigate the origin of the virus, the report was released afterwards, and Tan Desai, who was originally considered to be biased in favor of China, made a rare criticism of China for obstructing the expert team from obtaining the original data, much to the surprise of the world.
It is understood that in the last election of the WHO secretary-general, Tan Desai was supported by the African Union, which consists of 55 countries, and easily defeated five other candidates. The general election process has been launched last month, member states can nominate candidates by mid-September this year, the list will be announced at the end of October. If there are more than one person running, the WHO Executive Committee will visit each one and eventually nominate three candidates to be voted on by member states at next year’s World Health Assembly (WHA).
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