Coming soon: a vast health bureacracy with a vested interest in pandemics
The Covid-19 crisis illustrates how the source and scope of many critical problems are global and require multilateral solutions, but the policy authority and requisite resources for tackling them are vested in states. An efficient architecture of global health governance would have detected the emerging epidemiological threat early, sounded the alarm and coordinated the delivery of essential equipment and medicines to population clusters in the most need. The World Health Organisation is at the centre of the existing architecture. It works worldwide to promote universal health care, monitor public health risks, prepare for emerging epidemiological emergencies and coordinate responses. It sets international health standards and guidelines and provides technical assistance to countries in need. It’s credited with eradicating smallpox and coordinating the response to Sars. Its Covid performance, however, was somewhere between underwhelming and disgraceful. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm; by shabby treatment of Taiwan at China’s behest despite the potential lessons to be learnt from its prompt and effective measures to check Covid; by the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus; and by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns. For problems without passports, in Kofi Annan’s evocative phrase, we need solutions without passports. Instead, international and domestic border closures, wholesale quarantine of healthy populations and mandatory vaccine requirements insinuated passport requirements into daily activities.
Health includes mental health and wellbeing and is highly dependent on a robust economy, yet the WHO-backed package of measures to fight Covid has been damaging to health, children’s immunisation programs in developing countries, mental health, food security, economies, poverty reduction, social and educational wellbeing of peoples. Their worst effects were grievous assaults on human rights, civil liberties, individual autonomy and bodily integrity. To make it worse, in promoting these policies the WHO violated, without providing any justification beyond China’s example, (1) the guidance from its own report in October 2019 that summarised a century’s worth of worldwide experience and science; and (2) its own constitution which defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. The vaccine push has similarly ignored accumulating safety signals about the scale of adverse reactions, on the one hand, and rapidly dwindling efficacy after successive doses, on the other.
Continue reading WHO wants a new pandemic treaty?
