Reuters
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), will have history on his mind when he hosts almost 200 member states at the U.N agency's annual assembly this week. In a recent white paper laying out his plans for the future of global health security, Tedros began by quoting ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wanted the world to learn from the mistakes of a devastating plague in Athens in 430 BC. Nearly two-and-a-half millennia later and after COVID-19 has killed at least 15 million people globally, avoiding a repeat of fatal missteps in a future pandemic is the unwritten theme of this week's World Health Assembly in Geneva.