Fate of ancient Athens guides WHO at gathering to plan for next pandemic By Reuters

By Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge

LONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) – Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director normal of the World Well being Group (WHO), could have historical past on his thoughts when he hosts nearly 200 member states on the U.N company’s annual meeting this week.

In a current white paper laying out his plans for the way forward for world well being safety, Tedros started by quoting historical Greek historian Thucydides, who needed the world to study from the errors of a devastating plague in Athens in 430 BC.

Almost two-and-a-half millennia later and after COVID-19 has killed a minimum of 15 million individuals globally, avoiding a repeat of deadly missteps in a future pandemic is the unwritten theme of this week’s World Well being Meeting in Geneva.

Because the delegates meet, COVID nonetheless rages. Nations are extra polarised than ever over how finest to combat the world’s greatest well being disaster in a century. Efforts to vaccinate the world stay incomplete.

And what the UN company’s future position might be in stopping the world from forgetting this lethal outbreak – and guiding it by means of the following one – stays unclear.

STRENGTHENED WHO?

Tedros’ white paper, which might be mentioned on the meeting, imagines a future with a strengthened WHO on the centre of well being emergency preparedness.

Components of his plan have been seen by WHO watchers as an influence seize, together with a proposal to arrange a world well being emergencies council that’s “linked to and aligned with” WHO. Excessive-level exterior specialists have urged as a substitute that any physique of this sort needs to be unbiased, and on the world-leader degree.

An alternate proposal by the G20 for a pandemic fund of as much as $50 billion was initially seen as a possible rival to WHO, which has the ability to disburse cash by means of an emergencies mechanism in response to illness outbreaks.

Now the company is searching for to play a task within the proposed fund, presumably by means of a board seat, that means they may theoretically co-exist, with the fund channeling its cash by means of WHO.

The largest end result from the meeting itself is anticipated to be a funding deal seen as obligatory to make sure WHO’s survival, with an settlement set to be accredited by members which might assist lower its reliance on donations with strings hooked up.

WHO is at present funded largely by voluntary contributions from governments and personal donors, a set-up that the U.N. company and unbiased panels of specialists have stated is unsustainable because the organisation faces new challenges, together with increased dangers of pandemics in addition to different well being points from breastfeeding to Ebola.

A deal that will elevate necessary charges for member states and cut back its reliance on donations – so long as WHO makes much-needed modifications to enhance effectivity and transparency – is prone to be accredited.

It’s a essential first step in placing the world in a greater place for brand spanking new threats, based on observers. However extra must be performed.

“Strengthening WHO is important however not enough to stop, put together for and reply to a different pandemic,” stated Carolyn Reynolds, founding father of the Pandemic Motion Community.

That’s as a result of whereas WHO could also be greater than pandemics, pandemics are additionally greater than WHO.

“It is all arms to the wheel,” stated Helen Clark, co-chair of the Impartial Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, the physique arrange by WHO to evaluate the worldwide response to COVID.

Clark – a former New Zealand prime minister – needs not simply WHO however the world to study its classes, and quick.

The warnings Thucydides noticed in Athens, the place the plague left the traditional world’s experiment with democracy on its knees, have echoes immediately, with COVID buffeting the worldwide economic system and laying naked weaknesses in political programs.

Final week, the panel launched a report warning that regardless of some progress, the world isn’t any higher ready for brand spanking new well being threats than when coronavirus emerged in 2019, and will even be in a worse place given the pandemic’s financial toll.

Reforms are pressing, the report argued, and it’s not an both/or scenario. The world wants each a strengthened WHO and higher preparedness throughout the board.

As such, Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Legislation in Washington, D.C., who carefully follows WHO, says the company has a chance to reassert itself after a tricky few years.

“It is going to by no means be the identical, singular unrivalled world well being chief that it was in a long time following World Battle Two, however I believe it may well regain stature and authority within the ashes of this pandemic,” he stated.