Official who foresaw threat caught between a rock and a hard place
Just before the first cases of coronavirus were detected late last year, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus revealed that a pandemic was his biggest fear – “as a world we should be afraid,” he said.
But if the director general of the World Health Organisation foresaw the threat, he cannot have predicted the political challenge of steering the global response.
The American president says he is “China-centric” and failed to alert the world early enough. On social media he has been attacked with racist memes and death threats.
His supporters say he is dedicated, charismatic and warm. His detractors say he is more politician than doctor and his ego can get the better of him.
On taking office in 2017, Dr Tedros pledged to reform the UN agency, strengthen its emergency response programme and improve access to healthcare across the globe.
He grew up in northern Ethiopia, but while he went on to study biology at Eritrea’s University of Asmara, his brother died at the age of just four from a measles infection.
Dr Tedros studied for a doctorate at Nottingham University and a masters at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, before returning to Ethiopia and rising through the ranks of government, where he had a mixed record. While he has been praised for restructuring the healthcare system and drops in child and maternal mortality, the government had an abysmal human rights record.
Allegations he “covered up” cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia emerged while he was campaigning for the WHO job – claims he has strongly denied.
Most of those in his field maintain Dr Tedros is the right person to lead the organisation in crisis.
“At the end of the day no one else has faced a crisis like this,” said Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics. “I think much of the time, especially with China at the start, he was between a rock and a hard place.”