COMMENTARY Public Health

A WHO-Provided Lesson in How Not To Prevent Future Pandemics

Jun 3, 2024 4 min read

Commentary By

Steven Groves @stevegroves

Director, Policy Campaigns and Margaret Thatcher Fellow

Brett D. Schaefer

Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow, Margaret Thatcher Center

Photo taken on Jan. 30, 2023 shows a logo of the World Health Organization WHO at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Lian Yi / Xinhua / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

China was opaque and obstructive in the early weeks of the outbreak. It still refuses to cooperate with efforts to clarify the origins of the disease.

Preventing other governments from acting similarly in a future pandemic should be the primary objective of a new treaty.

The nations negotiating the treaty, including the U.S., should go back to the drawing board to craft a laser-focused agreement.

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The World Health Assembly, meeting this week in Geneva, Switzerland, thought it would be unveiling a new pandemic treaty for members to approve. Instead, negotiations stalled over fundamental disagreements involving intellectual-property rights, privileged access to pandemic-related materials such as vaccines, and World Health Organization control over pandemic-related materials.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus characterized this as a tragic missed opportunity. In truth, it’s a welcome opportunity for resetting a process that veered badly off track.

After COVID-19 swept the globe, killing millions and costing trillions of dollars, world leaders called for a legally binding agreement to apply the lessons of the pandemic. Those lessons seemed clear enough—that to prevent and respond to future outbreaks, the nations of the world needed to act more promptly, transparently, and cooperatively in alerting governments worldwide about a potential outbreak and sharing critical genomic data and other details.

Indeed, the faster the world detects and reacts to new and dangerous pathogens, the faster those pathogens can be defeated, and the more likely it is that a pandemic can be quashed before it starts.

>>> The WHO Pandemic Treaty Fails Again

If China had acted transparently and responsibly, as it had already pledged to do long before the COVID-19 outbreak, the pandemic would probably not have inflicted as much damage. Instead, China was opaque and obstructive in the early weeks of the outbreak. It still refuses to cooperate with efforts to clarify the origins of the disease.

A pandemic treaty worth adopting should, at a minimum, ensure that other countries cannot repeat China’s selfish and destructive actions without consequence.

The first draft of the pandemic treaty (called the “zero draft”), publicly released in February 2023, took initial steps toward this goal. The draft treaty required nations to provide “rapid access” to outbreak areas and to allow “the deployment of rapid response and expert teams to assess and support the response to emerging outbreaks.” It also required nations to rapidly share genomic data of any “pathogens with pandemic potential” so the WHO and other governments could quickly assess risks and devise responses.

Those were precisely the steps that China could have taken in late 2019. As detailed in 2022 Senate report, epidemical evidence indicates that COVID-19 began infecting people in Wuhan in October or November 2019, but China did not alert the international community of the outbreak until December 31—after Taiwan had already expressed concern.

In the early weeks of 2020, China slow-walked WHO requests for information, samples of the disease, and access for WHO health experts to assess the situation. Since January 2020, China has strictly restricted data and information on COVID-19 and has refused to cooperate with an independent WHO investigation into the origins of the disease. Even years after the outbreak, China has not been transparent in reporting deaths resulting from COVID-19.

Despite this lack of cooperation and transparency that contributed to the severity of COVID-19, China has paid no price.

Preventing other governments from acting similarly in a future pandemic should be the primary objective of a new treaty. But successive drafts of the agreement have drifted further and further from this focus. As it stands now, the treaty fails to require timely access for expert teams or to specify obligations by governments to provide full and timely disclosure of genomic data. Nor are there consequences for failing to comply with existing obligations on these matters.

>>> Stuck on Failure at the WHO

Instead, the agreement focuses on resource and technology transfers to developing countries (including China), encouraging overriding intellectual-property rights, and creating a new WHO bureaucracy to oversee distribution and manufacturing of pandemic-related materials such as vaccines.

The WHO’s deeply flawed draft treaty was supposed to be finished and approved in Geneva this week by the World Health Assembly. Instead, after governments failed to reach a consensus, the goal is to “agree the timing, format, and process to conclude the pandemic agreement.”

This is not a disappointment, but a mistake avoided. Nothing in the current draft treaty will prevent the next COVID-19, Zika, Ebola, or another pathogen from ravaging the globe. The U.S. should not support a “pandemic treaty” that does not actually focus on the problems revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A treaty to prevent future pandemics should be an issue that galvanizes the world. The nations negotiating the treaty, including the U.S., should go back to the drawing board to craft a laser-focused agreement that gets to the heart of the gaps in the international system that China exploited. Anything short of that is a missed opportunity and a disservice to the victims of COVID-19.

This piece originally appeared in the National Review