Much has been written on the current proposals putting the World Health Organization (WHO) front and center of future pandemic responses. With billions of dollars in careers, salaries, and research funding on the table, it is difficult for many to be objective. However, there are fundamentals here that everyone with public health training should agree upon. Most others, if they take time to consider, would also agree. Including, when divorced from party politicking and soundbites, most politicians.
So here, from an orthodox public health standpoint, are some problems with the proposals on pandemics to be voted on at the World Health Assembly at the end of this month.
Unfounded Messaging on Urgency
The Pandemic Agreement (treaty) and IHR amendments have been promoted based on claims of a rapidly increasing risk of pandemics. In fact, they pose an ‘existential threat’ (i.e. one that may end our existence) according to the G20’s High Level Independent Panel in 2022. However, the increase in reported natural outbreaks on which the WHO, the World Bank, G20, and others based these claims is shown to be unfounded in a recent analysis from the UK’s University of Leeds. The main database on which most outbreak analyses rely, the GIDEON database, shows a reduction in natural outbreaks and resultant mortality over the past 10 to 15 years, with the prior increase between 1960 and 2000 fully consistent with the development of the technologies necessary to detect and record such outbreaks; PCR, antigen and serology tests, and genetic sequencing.
The WHO does not refute this but simply ignores it. Nipah viruses, for example, only ‘emerged’ in the late 1990s when we found ways to actually detect them. Now we can readily distinguish new variants of coronavirus to promote uptake of pharmaceuticals. The risk does not change by detecting them; we just change the ability to notice them. We also have the ability to modify viruses to make them worse – this is a relatively new problem. But do we really want an organization influenced by China, with North Korea on its executive board (insert your favorite geopolitical rivals), to manage a future bioweapons emergency?
Irrespective of growing evidence that Covid-19 was not a natural phenomenon, modelling that the World Bank quotes as suggesting a 3x increase in outbreaks over the next decade actually predicts that a Covid-like event will recur less than once per century. Diseases that the WHO uses to suggest an increase in outbreaks over the past 20 years, including cholera, plague, yellow fever, and influenza variants were orders of magnitude worse in past centuries.
This all makes it doubly confusing that the WHO is breaking its own legal requirements in order to push through a vote without Member States having time to properly review implications of the proposals. The urgency must be for reasons other than public health need. Others can speculate why, but we are all human and all have egos to protect, even when preparing legally binding international agreements.
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