WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the Harvard University Health Coverage Fellowship – 18 September 2026

Thank you, Larry. Hello to you and everyone, and thank you for inviting me.

Congratulations to this year's fellows, and congratulations to Harvard on the 25th anniversary of this fellowship.

For a quarter of a century, it has helped journalists deepen their understanding of health and science, and tell stories that matter.

WHO values professional, independent journalism very highly.

Accurate reporting is one of the foundations of public health.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learned again that outbreaks are fought not only in laboratories, hospitals and communities, but also on social and traditional media.

We saw how misinformation and disinformation could spread faster than the virus, undermining trust, distorting public understanding, and in some cases contributing to decisions that cost lives.

In fact, WHO described COVID-19 not only as a pandemic, but as an infodemic.

Very early in the pandemic, we began holding press briefings every day, to provide journalists with direct access to the latest evidence, data and guidance.

Although COVID has receded from the headlines, the need for trusted health information has not.

That is why WHO has continued holding regular press conferences ever since.

We do this because informed societies depend on informed journalism.

And informed journalism depends on access to facts, evidence and experts.

So thank you for the work you do, often under intense pressure, to help the public navigate an increasingly complex information environment.

Today I want to talk not about the stories that journalists write, but about the ones they don't.

Not because they are neglected by choice, but because they are harder to tell.

They do not fit easily into headlines. They do not always have heroes and villains. They unfold over years, not days. And often, they begin in places that the world rarely notices.

The first story is about the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ebola makes the headlines for understandable reasons. It's dramatic. It's frightening. It has a high fatality rate. It captures public attention in a way few diseases do.

But when I visited eastern DRC earlier this year, what struck me was not Ebola itself, it was everything around it.

One community leader asked me why the world seems to care so much about Ebola, but not about the many other threats that his community faces:

People living with conflict. Displacement. Hunger. Destroyed health facilities. Interrupted vaccination programmes. Children who cannot get basic health care. Pregnant women who cannot reach emergency services.

So far, 3600 people have died from Ebola in this outbreak.

By comparison WHO estimates that 67 000 people die with malaria in DRC alone every single year - 18 times more.

Why do some emergencies attract global attention, while the conditions that make those emergencies possible remain largely invisible?

Which leads me to the second story.

This is now the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC.

We understand Ebola. We know these outbreaks start, and we know how to stop them.

So why do they keep happening, and how do we prevent the 18th outbreak, and the 19th?

Many people see Ebola as a story about emergency response.

I see it increasingly as a One Health story.

The virus does not emerge in isolation. It emerges at the intersection of human health, animal health and environmental change.

Deforestation, land use, population growth and changing patterns of interaction between people and animals can all affect the risk of spillover.

Ebola outbreaks usually start with people touching or eating wild animals infected with Ebola.

But prevention is not simply a matter of telling people to change their behaviour.

People rely on forests for livelihoods. People rely on local markets for food. Cultural traditions, diets and economic realities all play an important part.

That is what makes the story so interesting.

How do communities live with risk? How do governments reduce risk without undermining livelihoods? How do conservation, agriculture, trade and public health intersect?

Outbreaks, like wars, don't just start for no reason. They emerge from a context that is often complex.

And if we want to prevent outbreaks, we need to understand that context.

The third story is about COVID-19.

Many people remember COVID as a story of failure.

And there were failures:

The world was not prepared.

Health systems were overwhelmed.

Inequities were exposed.

Trust was tested.

But if that is the only lesson we remember, we miss a much more important story.

Because since the pandemic, global health security has undergone its most significant strengthening in decades.

WHO, countries and partners have established many new initiatives to improve access to vaccines and other tools, to strengthen regional manufacturing, surveillance and financing for preparedness.

The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, the Pandemic Fund, the BioHub System, the Global Health Emergency Corps and many others did not exist before COVID.

Member States strengthened the International Health Regulations and adopted the WHO Pandemic Agreement.

Of course, we can never say the world is prepared enough for the next pandemic.

But it is much better prepared than it was ten years ago. Countries have stronger capacities, stronger institutions, stronger legal frameworks and greater awareness of the risks they face.

Too often, preparedness becomes visible only when it fails.

The stronger story is what preparedness looks like when it works.

How many outbreaks are detected earlier?

How many lives are saved because surveillance is stronger?

How much economic damage is avoided because investments were made before a crisis?

Those stories are harder to tell because success often means something does not happen.

But they are just as important.

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Finally, the fourth story.

As you all know, in January last year, the United States announced its intention to withdraw from WHO and to stop all funding with immediate effect.

Other countries also reduced their funding as they redirected money from strengthening international development to buttressing domestic defence.

There were some who predicted dire consequences for WHO - that it was facing an existential crisis that jeopardised its future.

While the funding cuts were a serious challenge, the organization has now stabilised and is moving forward.

For example, in the DRC, WHO has the largest on-the-ground presence of any agency. We are coordinating the response, even though we have not received anything from the US.

And although we had to say goodbye to more than 1000 talented and hard-working colleagues, job losses at WHO were less as a proportion of our workforce than many other organizations in global health and development that were similarly exposed to US funding.

Why? Because we foresaw a scenario like this nine years ago and began preparing for it.

WHO receives two main types of income: assessed contributions, which are the membership dues countries pay; and voluntary contributions from countries, foundations, philanthropies and others.

Assessed contributions are predictable and flexible. Voluntary contributions are unpredictable, and usually come tightly earmarked for specific projects chosen by donors.

When I began as Director-General in 2017, assessed contributions accounted for just 20% of our base budget, and voluntary contributions accounted for the other 80%.

We saw this imbalance as a major risk to the organization's stability and independence, if a major donor were to withdraw suddenly.

We proposed a plan, which our Member States approved in 2022, to raise assessed contributions to 50% of the base budget from just 20%, in five instalments over 10 years.

The first two instalments were made in 2023 and 2025, and three more are planned for 2027, 2029 and 2031.

This decision was not a technical adjustment. It was one of the most important institutional reforms in WHO's history.

It made WHO more sustainable, more independent and more resilient.

And it helped to cushion the impact of last year's funding cuts, although it could not insulate us fully.

Without the first two increases in assessed contributions, WHO would have lost hundreds more positions than it did.

Thanks to these measures, we have mobilized 92 percent of the resources needed for our current two-year period, which is the strongest position we have ever been in at this stage of a biennium.

However, because most voluntary contributions remain earmarked, pockets of poverty persist in parts of our work - some are fully funded, some are not.

This raises a broader question about how global health is funded, by whom, and under what conditions.

There are projects and programmes that attract significant interest from donors, and others that attract hardly any.

That is not only a WHO story.

It is a story about the future of international cooperation itself.

So those are four stories I wish journalists would tell more often:

Why communities facing Ebola are confronting far more than Ebola.

How One Health can help prevent future outbreaks.

How COVID transformed global health security.

And why financing institutions matters as much as financing programmes.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to our discussion.