WHO bets on health that is 'digital, whether we like it or not' and holds up South Korea as a model of vaccine equity

By Korea JoongAng Daily · 26 October 2026.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus argued in an interview with Korea JoongAng Daily and JoongAng Ilbo in Seoul that AI must be a central tool for healthcare and health security. “The future of healthcare is digital, whether we like it or not,” he said. He cited three uses: disease surveillance, vaccine research and development, and improving care services. By his account, he discussed this with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, whom he met on 21 October.

The other half of the story is vaccine equity. According to Tedros, the WHO and Korea recently inaugurated new facilities for the WHO's global biomanufacturing training hub. The hub transfers pharmaceutical technology to low- and middle-income countries. Tedros says it will be able to train around 2,000 people a year. He also said Korea has already trained some 4,000 people from 100 countries. These are the WHO's own figures and have not been independently verified.

Tedros recalled that the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the lack of equity: rich countries quickly secured doses, some more than they needed, while poor countries were left behind. The WHO's response is to strengthen local production. He also praised Korean company EuBiologics, which makes oral cholera vaccines, and noted that vaccines against cholera, typhoid or meningococcus yield thin margins and sometimes cause companies losses. That, he said, is why its commitment to public health matters.

He added that he briefed Lee on the WHO's reforms in response to funding cuts, without specifying what they are.

Our take: the most valuable part of the interview is not the line about AI, which is generic, but the combination of two ideas. The first is that AI can speed up surveillance and vaccine development. In general, there is real potential there: detecting outbreaks earlier and shortening research cycles. But the article cites no specific system, results or timelines. It is a statement of intent, not a demonstrated capability, and should be treated as such.

The second idea is the one that underpins the first: a vaccine designed in weeks with AI is of little use if it can only be manufactured in a handful of countries. Tedros points to exactly that bottleneck. Design will keep getting cheaper; manufacturing, staff training and distribution are the hard part. A hub that trains 2,000 people a year is modest against the scale of the problem, but it is the kind of unglamorous infrastructure on which getting technology to everyone depends.

Context matters. By Tedros's own account, the WHO faces funding cuts just as more is being asked of it. The short-term risk is that AI is used as an efficiency argument to replace human capacity and budgets, and that its benefits concentrate in systems that are already wealthy and digitised. The equity gap the pandemic laid bare could repeat itself with algorithms.

In the long run, Zendoric's core thesis fits this message: medicine that prevents and eradicates diseases is only good news if it is global. AI-assisted surveillance, faster vaccines and distributed production are three parts of the same system. The WHO and its partners should be judged not by their speeches, but by how many countries end up manufacturing their own vaccines the next time they are needed.