European leaders back efforts to strengthen the W.H.O.

Leaders of France and Germany voiced support on Monday for making the World Health Organization more independent and building up its ability to respond to global health crises.

President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany spoke at the opening of the weeklong annual policymaking assembly for the global public health body. Its 194 member states are scheduled to discuss how the W.H.O. coped with the coronavirus pandemic and how global health institutions need to be strengthened to prepare for the next challenge.

The European Union has drafted a proposal to give the W.H.O. powers to rapidly and independently investigate disease outbreaks, bypassing the kind of delays the organization faced from China in trying to investigating the coronavirus outbreak. But the proposal has run into strong resistance from a number of states, including China and Russia.

“We have to have institutions that are up to the task,” Mr. Macron told the opening session of the assembly in a video statement. He urged member states to increase the organization’s budget and reduce its dependence on a few big donor states.

“This organization has to be robust in times of crisis, it has to be flexible enough to react to emergencies, and it has be solid when it comes to controversies,” as well as free of political pressure, he said.

Ms. Merkel called for establishing a global health threat council that would monitor states’ compliance with international health regulations, and she urged states to support an international treaty on how to tackle future global pandemics.

The W.H.O. should continue to play a leading role in global health care, Ms. Merkel said. “If it is to do so, however, we must provide it with lasting financial and personal support,” she said. “We have been talking about this for years, but now it is all the more important to act,” she said.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. chief, warned that vaccine nationalism and “scandalous inequity” in the distribution of coronavirus vaccines was perpetuating the pandemic. He called for action to vaccinate at least 10 percent of the population of every country by September.

Meeting that target would require states to vaccinate 250 million people in low- and middle-income countries in the next four months, he noted. “We need hundreds of millions more doses,” he said, “and we need them to start moving in early June.”