https://doi.org/10.1177/1468018120966659 Global Social Policy 2020, Vol. 20(3) 383–387 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1468018120966659 journals.sagepub.com/home/gsp gsp COVID-19 response exposes deep flaws in global health governance David G Legge La Trobe University, Australia; People’s Health Movement, Australia The global COVID-19 response exposes flaws at the heart of the prevailing regime of global health governance (GHG): first, in the debates about fast tracking the develop- ment of vaccines and medicines and, second, in the extraordinary variations in national responses to the pandemic. The World Health Assembly (WHA), the governing body of World Health Organization (WHO), is a leading player in GHG. For many years, it has also been a key site where geopolitical contradictions between the Global North and the Global South are played out. The US withdrawal from WHO is the latest initiative in a continuing campaign to marginalise WHO and in doing so to marginalise the voices of developing countries since the Assembly is the principal forum where they are able to participate in GHG. Under the banner of so-called ‘WHO reform’, there has been continuing pressure to transform the WHO from an intergovernmental body, where member states have sover- eignty, to a ‘multi-stakeholder public private partnership’ model where transnational cor- porations and philanthropic foundations are able take up (what they see as) their rightful seat at the table. The long-standing freeze on assessed contributions associated with tightly earmarked voluntary contributions, implemented from the mid-1980s, was imposed and has been maintained, with a view to restricting the influence of the Global South over the work programme of WHO (Legge, 2015). A slightly different theme, long embedded in the International Health Regulations (IHRs), positions developing countries as a public health threat to the rich world. This preoccupation with ‘protecting us from them’ is commonly articulated in the discourse of ‘global health security’. Over the last 6 years, since the Ebola outbreak in 2014, there has been a campaign of finger pointing around the failure of certain developing countries to invest sufficiently in the ‘core capacities’ which the IHRs require (laboratory capacity, public health surveillance, border control, etc.). Corresponding author: David G Legge, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 3086, VIC, Australia. Email: d.legge@latrobe.edu.au 966659GSP 0 0 10.1177/1468018120966659Global Social PolicyLegge research-article 2020 GSP Forum