What world must learn to protect us next time

The greatest tragedy of Covid-19 will be if we fail to learn from the experience, and allow history to repeat itself. While every country will have its own inquiries to examine how they handled their crisis, the much larger need is how the hyper-globalised community dealt with the worst pandemic in more than a century which has swept the Earth, destroying lives and economies. To answer this, two inquiries are required.

The first needs only to answer the most simple questions: where did Covid-19 come from and what role did humanity play in its creation? The second needs to focus on the response of the international community. Although the World Health Organisation should be at the forefront of this, it will also need to examine the other relevant international actors, from those who wield the power (the Security Council) to those who control the money (the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and those who distribute the food (the World Food Programme) to the hungry. The way information science and medical technology has been cooperatively developed, and shared, needs to be central to any such focus.

Despite the need, there is a large risk such a universal review may not occur because political will may drown beneath a debate over whether there should be inquiries at all, and if so, which questions should be asked, and by whom.

The way such work is meant to occur at the global level is that where there is a problem, an empowered international organisation sends out a team to investigate and report. Thus, if it was a dispute about nuclear questions, a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency would be dispatched.

The problem we have with Covid-19 is that it is complicated deciding which international organisation has primacy. That is, in origin, this disease is either natural or human made.

If it is the latter, it may have been manipulated for either benign or malicious purposes, and escaped, by either an accidental or intentional pathway.

In this situation of uncertainty, ideally, the two organisations which work in this area — the WHO and the Biological Weapons Convention — would come together to solve the problem for the common global good.

The difficulty is two-fold. On the one hand, the Biological Weapons Convention has no verification protocol. This means, although defensive (but no offensive) work is allowed on biological weapons, there is no way to verify, via an intrusive regime, who is doing what or if leaks have occurred. On the other hand, the WHO has the mandate to conduct some work of this sort, and often does so, but is at the moment neck deep in very dangerous diplomatic politics.

Solving this problem requires two steps. The first is to remove the science from the politics, and answer the initial question of where did this come from and what role did humanity play in its creation?

The best international precedent for this type of project is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here, hundreds of the world’s best scientists collectively and independently review the evidence, and answer questions from a non-partisan perspective.

The second inquiry, on the international architecture, must also be removed from those complicit in the situation, who have their own turf to protect. Former heads and other highlevel diplomatic engineers should be shoulder-tapped.

The culmination of these two pieces of work should be a new international instrument specifically on pandemics.

In this, new laws, standards and goals, can be set for dealing with the next pandemic which will, without doubt, attack humanity.