Contesting a Pandemic: The WHO and the Council of Europe

Abstract

Contemporary risks are often understood as fundamentally uncertain. This uncertain status can be mobilized within political debates surrounding risks. Such a challenge serves to destablise scientific claims. The World Health Organisation's (WHO) management of the 2009/10 spread of the H1N1 virus became a site of one such contestation. Debate within the Council of Europe particularly served to criticize the action of the WHO. This resulted in a definitional and policy contestation between the two institutions. The WHO accounted for its actions through allusions to (seemingly stable) scientific facts, using epidemiological evidence of influenza and its management based on normal science. In contrast, in criticising public expenditure and panic, the Council of Europe critics problematised the stability of the science employed by the WHO. This included fundamental aspects of scientific knowledge such as the measurability of morbidity and mortality caused by H1N1 and the effect of vaccination against influenza viruses. This criticism relied upon the ability to destabilise the WHO's scientific knowledge, a process made possible through understandings of the uncertain nature of the science of risk (post-normal science). The case study illustrates that potential for previous-established and seemingly stable scientific facts to become destablised and problematised during contestations of risk management.

Global Health Governance and Pandemics: Uncertainty and Institutional Decision-Making

“…What H1N1 and the WHO's response did was to expose the fragility of the pandemic as a scientific fact. Following this, not only was the management of the threat called into question, but also the WHO's authority (Abeysinghe 2017).…”