Holding Up a Mirror to the World Trade Organization: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The devastating COVID-19 pandemic has thrown several aspects of global governance under challenge. The World Health Organization (WHO), as the nodal organization mandated to deal with public health issues, has understandably attracted the greatest attention in the context of the pandemic, and has come under fire for a multitude of sins of both omission and commission (e.g., Applebaum 2020; Buranyi 2020; Saran 2020). But what of other cognate international institutions that govern the global political economy and thereby facilitate or hamper access to lifesaving medical equipment and drugs, provide a system of enforceable rules to encourage vaccine development and distribution, or ensure that populations already beleaguered by a potentially lethal contagion do not become casualties of new scarcities of essential goods and services? In this article, I focus on one such key organization: the World Trade Organization (WTO), the primary regulator of trade multilateralism, which assists in the seamless...