Destiny of historic Athens guides WHO at gathering to plan for subsequent pandemic By Reuters

By Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge

LONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) – Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director common of the World Well being Group (WHO), can 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 historic Greek historian Thucydides, who needed the world to be taught 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 at the least 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. International locations are extra polarised than ever over how greatest to battle the world’s largest 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 subsequent 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.

Elements of his plan have been seen by WHO watchers as an influence seize, together with a proposal to arrange a worldwide well being emergencies council that’s “linked to and aligned with” WHO. Excessive-level exterior consultants have recommended as an alternative that any physique of this sort ought to be unbiased, and on the world-leader stage.

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 looking for to play a job 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 most important consequence from the meeting itself is predicted to be a funding deal seen as mandatory to make sure WHO’s survival, with an settlement set to be accredited by members which might assist minimize its reliance on donations with strings connected.

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

A deal that may elevate obligatory charges for member states and cut back its reliance on donations – so long as WHO makes much-needed adjustments to enhance effectivity and transparency – is more likely to be accredited.

It’s a essential first step in placing the world in a greater place for brand new threats, in line with observers. However extra must be completed.

“Strengthening WHO is crucial however not enough to forestall, 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 evaluation the worldwide response to COVID.

Clark – a former New Zealand prime minister – desires not simply WHO however the world to be taught 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 at this time, with COVID buffeting the worldwide financial system and laying naked weaknesses in political methods.

Final week, the panel launched a report warning that regardless of some progress, the world is not any higher ready for brand 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 intently follows WHO, says the company has a possibility to reassert itself after a tricky few years.

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