Ethiopian wins race to be next leader of UN health agency
GENEVA — Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a former Ethiopian minister of health, was elected as the next director-general of the World Health Organization on Tuesday, becoming the first non-medical doctor and the first African tapped to lead the U.N. health agency.
Delegates, health ministers and other high-level envoys chose Tedros over Britain’s Dr. David Nabarro, a U.N. veteran, in the third and final round of voting. Tedros had 133 votes to Nabarro’s 50, with two abstentions.
The third candidate, Pakistan’s Dr. Sania Nishtar, was eliminated in the first round.
Ethiopian delegates could be seen hugging and high-fiving each other after their countryman made it to the second round. Tedro succeeds China’s Dr. Margaret Chan, who is ending a 10-year tenure at the U.N. health agency on June 30.
The director-general of WHO wields considerable power in setting medical priorities that affect billions of people and declaring when crises like disease outbreaks evolve into global emergencies.
The agency has stumbled in recent years, most notably in its error-prone response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and all three candidates vowed to overhaul its organization to restore credibility.
Of the U.N. health agency’s 194 member states, 185 were eligible to cast ballots; nine others were either in arrears on their dues or not represented at the gathering.
Before voting started, Tedros said it was almost “pure luck” that he was competing to lead WHO.
In his appeal to voters, Tedros noted that when he was growing up in Ethiopia, his 7-year-old brother was killed by a common childhood disease, and it easily could have been him instead.
His humble background, he said, taught him to refuse “to accept that people should die because they’re poor.” Among other pledges, Tedros said he would work “tirelessly to fulfil WHO’s promise of universal health care.”
“There is real value in electing a leader who has worked in one of the toughest environments,” Tedros said, adding that he could “bring an angle the world has never seen before.”
The former health minister has been dogged by allegations that he covered up cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia, and protesters have occasionally interrupted proceedings at the meeting in Geneva this week.
But Tedros received a boost from Dr. Thomas Frieden, an ex-director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Frieden wrote a letter published in the New York Times last week that commended Tedros for his creation of a network of 40,000 female health workers that implemented programs to save people from dying of diarrhea and other causes.