(Originally published by Foreign Policy on May 3, 2022) 

As the World Health Organization seeks to revise global figures, politics in New Delhi stand in the way.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), visited India last month to launch the new Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in Gujarat. The trip came amid controversy over the country’s COVID-19 death toll as the WHO seeks to revise global mortality figures from the pandemic. India’s official count numbers 520,000 deaths, but the WHO and several previous studies have estimated that as many as 4 million Indians have died from COVID-19.

(Continue reading the opinion essay on Foreign Policy’s page here.)