As of July 2020, COVID-19 has caused over 600,000 deaths, with 17 million confirmed cases, and counting. The World Health Organization (WHO), the global governance organization charged with providing health for all, declared a pandemic of on March 11, signaling the beginning of the global response to the disease. Despite a commitment to human rights and health, the WHO and others have been virtually silent on how rights and pandemic management go together, and have largely relied on techniques that date back to the 1918 flu epidemic. COVID-19 has made painfully obvious the tension between the protection of public health and the protection of human rights. The "rights-based approach" to health espoused by the WHO needs to be reexamined in light of how public health and human rights may, in times of crisis, work at cross-purposes. We show this through an analysis of the WHO's COVID-19-related publications. As a doctor I would say let's put tanks in the streets and let's do a police state. … But the Western world has different realities (Guido Marinoni, president of the Bergamo Doctor Association, in response to Italy's policies in the COVID-19 crisis (as quoted in the New York Times, April 24, 2020; Horowitz and Bubola 2020). Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic, or social condition.