The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest global health crisis in at least a generation, and international organizations have responded accordingly. By building on measures initially developed to counter the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the global community’s response has easily been the most multilateral public health campaign in human history.
By April 2020, for instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) had announced the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, a program designed to help develop and improve access to diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. Other international organizations quickly pioneered new ways to combat the pandemic’s economic impact. The World Bank approved plans to deploy an unprecedented $160 billion in capital, alongside an additional $50 billion in international development funding, and the International Monetary Fund played a vital role in coordinating economic resources for the response. These multilateral efforts are a far cry from the unilateral model used during previous disease outbreaks (the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to take one example). In many ways, COVID-19 marked an important step toward genuine international cooperation.
