The 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak and the myth of global health diplomacy

Abstract

The 2014 outbreak of Ebola Virus Epidemic in West Africa – the disease’s deadliest outbreak ever – came to the region as a major unfamiliar health challenge. With no existing vaccines against the Ebola virus, the outbreak, exacerbated by poverty, weak national health systems, and legacies of protracted violence and civil war, left profound harm on already impoverished countries in the region, claiming a combined death of 11,325 lives – a figure that dwarfs casualties in all previous outbreaks. Despite the existing framework for global health diplomacy and governance, which advocates swift global response to health emergencies no matter where they occurred, international responses to the outbreak were lax, complicatedly slow and uncoordinated. Works of diverse backgrounds have analysed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from different perspectives. Yet, with only a few exceptions, existing scholarship has focused on the nature of the outbreak, its geographical spread and impact, as well as the inherent weaknesses in the local health system of severely affected countries. Thus, intellectual discourse on the international response to the outbreak has received minimal attention from scholars. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by building on primary and secondary sources and exploring the lax response of the mechanisms of global health governance to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It asks: Why was the international response to the West African Ebola outbreak atrociously slow? Is international response only swift and comprehensive if an outbreak is seen to bear greater risks for developed countries? Findings reveal that though there were eventually significant steps and efforts by many states, non-state actors and relevant international health agencies, however, they did not represent a coherent, comprehensive and coordinated swift response to issues of international health emergencies envisaged by the principles of GHD. Among others, it suggests that since epidemics/pandemics cross borders far and near, international responses to infectious diseases outbreak should be swift, comprehensive and based on the idea of shared threat and shared responsibility.