WHO, COVID-19, and Taiwan as the Ghost Island

Abstract

The Taiwan issue continually haunts WHO. However, before addressing Taiwan's inclusion into WHO, we first describe how the era in which WHO was founded, and WHO's resulting constitutional mandate, have focused the Organisation's work on infectious disease eradication. Narrowing in on pandemic managementone aspect of infectious disease eradicationwe describe what WHO can offer. These two sections allude to what Taiwan is excluded from. Using Taiwan's COVID-19 experience as a case study, Taiwan's successful management suggests that it is excluded from little, and thus marginally benefits in terms of public health. Yet, there are beneficial political gains in its call for inclusion. Taiwan's recent leveraging and amplification of its COVID-19 success story is thus an extension of its health diplomacy. Extending the call for inclusion online captures a novel digitised health diplomacy effort from Taiwan. The present study computationally analyses pressrelease and Twitter data to understand how Taiwanese government engages in these channels to frame and respond to the Taiwan/WHO issue. We find that Taiwan brands and propagates a 'Taiwan Model' through hashtags that revolve around coordination and solidarity as opposed to exclusion, indirectly criticising WHO. The piece concludes by discussing the foundational weaknesses in WHO's pandemic management effort in contrast to Taiwan's successful effort despite exclusion. Although Taiwan's inclusion to WHO is improbable due to larger geopolitical factors, inclusion is not a zero-sum game, with potential bi-directional benefits and lessons that can fortify domestic health capacities in preparation for the next pandemic.

How #TaiwanCanHelp Reverberates: An Exploratory Analysis of Advocacy Hashtag on Twitter

“…Negative sentiment tweets, while climaxing in April 2020 (Figure 2), were largely correlated with the response toward accusations of racist slurs against Dr Tedros (J. D. Yin, 2021) as well as the transnational meme war titled #MilkTeaAlliance led by young netizens from Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, which further extended to Myanmar, the Philippines, and India (Bernal, 2020).…”

Relevance of the world health organization in a multipolar world in solving global health challenges

“…Authors found that the WHO failed to manage COVID-19 across the world in contrast to the success of Taiwan. The region's geopolitics do not help Taiwan to be included in the WHO despite its effort in meaningful value creation in global health diplomacy ( 28 ).…”

Politics and pandemics

“…Based on epidemiological analysis of the COVID-19 cases in the country, and analysis of media coverage and Bolsonaro's discourses around COVID-19, Massard da Fonseca et al show that Bolsonaro undermined the country's response to COVID-19 and likely exacerbated the epidemic by adopting a populist approach that was based on creating a false dilemma between health and the economy, denying the seriousness of the pandemic, and blaming on others for the economic difficulties that arose from the sanitary crisis. This is followed by the paper from Yin, 'WHO, COVID-19, and Taiwan as the Ghost Island' (Yin, 2021), which discusses the Taiwanese response to COVID-19 in the light of the long-lasting conflicts between Taiwan and the World Health Organization due to the non-recognition of Taiwan by WHO as a fully independent nation. Yin shows how the shortcomings of WHO in pandemic management set the scene for Taiwan to use its successful COVID-19 management to promote its international status and strengthen its political force in the bid for greater WHO inclusion, as seen in campaigns like #TaiwanCanHelp and #TaiwanIsHelping.…”