Leaders slam pandemic response

Strong UN response urged to ‘crisis of multilateralism’

Now is amake-orbreak moment for the humankind. Kassym-jomart Tokayev,

Kazakhstan’s president

World leaders gathering remotely yesterday criticised a haphazard global response to a microscopic virus that has unleashed economic havoc and taken nearly 1 million lives in its march across the globe. In the words of Kazakhstan’s president, it was “a critical collapse of global co-operation”.

“Our world has been turned upside down,” said Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-addo.

“We all fell together and looked into the abyss together.”

The coronavirus pandemic and its consequences topped the list of concerns on the second day of prerecorded speeches by world leaders at the General Assembly’s first virtual high-level meeting. Countries large and small spoke about struggling to deal with its impact without international co-ordination.

Pleas for the world to work together to combat the scourge and other global problems have taken the forefront at this week’s UN gathering that itself was altered by the virus.

“A pandemic is by definition a global challenge” and requires a global response, but Covid-19 “has unfortunately revealed how we are tempted to react to immediate threats — nationally, not internationally”, said Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto.

Instead of uniting behind multilateral efforts to tackle the coronavirus, he said, “we witnessed a series of national responses”, which “raise concerns on how we will be able to combat other global challenges”.

Kazakhstan’s president, KassymJomart Tokayev, warned that the world is “coming close to what some have already called a state of ‘global disfunction”’ as a result of the pandemic, and the global system is now

“on the verge of dramatic upheavals that may lead to irreversible consequences”.

“Now is a make-or-break moment for the humankind,” he warned.

Tokayev called for upgrading national health institutions, taking politics out of the development of a coronavirus vaccine, and revising regulations to improve the World Health Organisation and enable all countries to prevent and respond to diseases.

The Kazakh leader proposed establishing an International Agency for Biological Safety based on the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention that would be accountable to the UN

Security Council. And he suggested creating a network of regional centres for disease control and biosafety under UN auspices.

Many leaders also called for any Covid-19 vaccine that is developed to be shared equally, with Sefik Dzaferovic, chairman of Bosnia’s three-member presidency, saying it must be available “to the entire mankind”.

Dzaferovic said the past few years have seen “a very strong crisis of multilateralism” at international organisations including the UN, which has become “an object of strong challenging and even dispute”.

But the pandemic has shown “their extraordinary significance in today’s globalised world”, he said, and has also shown that “the largest problems of today can no longer be solved by one, three or five states individually”.

As the global death toll from the virus approaches 1 million, many leaders spoke about how dramatically lives have changed in their countries.

Ghana’s Akufo-addo said people everywhere have learned not to shake hands or hug loved ones, not to sing in groups because it’s become “a dangerous activity” and to worry about the safety of sending children to school.

And “for many people, the most difficult thing to deal with in these uncertain and unsettling times has been the silence forced on churches, mosques, temples and other places of worship,” he said.

The pandemic also “has shone a crude light on inequality in the world,” said Honduran President Juan Orlando Herna´ndez, a Covid-19 survivor.

Switzerland’s President Simonetta Sommaruga, one of the few women leaders to speak, said the pandemic “has caused untold suffering in the world”, with the most vulnerable hit hardest.

“If every crisis is a suffering, it is also a moment of change that allows us to reinvent ourselves,” she said.

“So let’s reinvent ourselves.”— AP