A WHO pandemic pact would leave the world at China’s mercy

On May 22, the World Health Organisation (WHO) meets for the World Health Assembly, an annual summit to which all the globe’s countries are invited – except Taiwan, which is excluded at China’s behest. On the agenda is a “pandemic accord” that would greatly expand the WHO’s powers to intervene in a country in the event of a future outbreak.

The European Union, true to form, pushed for a legally binding pandemic “treaty” instead, but that won’t happen for two reasons: the American Senate would need a two-thirds majority to ratify it; and the Chinese government would not allow even its pet international agency to tell it what to do. But the accord would still have substantial force of international law behind it, to make governments impose domestic lockdowns, for example – despite the WHO’s own figures showing little correlation between lockdown severity and death rates.

Though some of the measures make sense – such as more sharing of vaccines with other countries – the plan skates around WHO’s errors during the Covid pandemic: it ignored Taiwan’s early alarm call; praised the Chinese government for its transparency at a time when it was denying human-tohuman transmission and punishing whistleblowers; delayed declaring a health emergency; flip-flopped on masks and lockdowns; and mounted a farcical Potemkin investigation into the origin of the virus.

Added to its poor performance in the 2014 ebola outbreak, when for months WHO resisted calls from doctors and NGOs to declare an emergency to avoid offending member governments, this track record does not inspire confidence.

According to the agenda of next Sunday’s meeting, the accord would be part of six “action tracks” focused on: healthcare systems; zoonotic outbreaks; endemic tropical diseases; food safety; antimicrobial resistance; and protecting the environment.

What is missing from that list? Something WHO itself and the US and other governments insist might well have been the cause of the Covid pandemic, namely a laboratory experiment gone wrong or a virushunting researcher infected while sampling bats in the field.

The continuing failure to find an animal infected with the virus in food markets or elsewhere, plus some peculiar features of the virus’s genome, has led many to conclude that a proper investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is warranted. But the institute has refused all requests to open up its 22,000-item database for international inspection, even though doing so could go a long way to reassuring the world.

So you might think the World Health Assembly would have put lab safety and transparency of research on the agenda at the very least. But nowhere are these even mentioned. Presumably China would object. In February the WHO held the third “Covid-19 Global research and innovation forum”. In the titles of the 49 sessions, the word “origin” did not appear once. Though it has set up a committee, the WHO seems to be paying no more than lip service to its own commitment to investigating the possibility of a lab leak. Like some Western scientists, it may be hoping the question of the origin of this dreadful pandemic remains unsolved lest the answer ruffle diplomatic feathers.

Here’s what a pandemic accord should include, in my view: a commitment by all national governments to share the genomic data of all viruses collected in the wild and to share details of all experiments being done on potential pandemic pathogens (yes, including in biowarfare labs).

Something similar happens with nuclear research and with airline accidents, so it can be done.

If China’s government refuses to sign, then let’s gradually shame it into doing so. But it looks like we will have to do this outside the WHO.

Lessons have not been learned, so why should we trust our global health watchdog in a future crisis?