Vulnerable nations should guide terms of ‘pandemic treaty’

IN the wake of the appearance of the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for the creation of a binding “pandemic treaty” that will guide the world’s response to any future pandemic. There is widespread support for the WHO’s recommendation, and this is encouraging because it shows that, at the very least, most of the world realizes that we must try to retain the lessons learned from the current pandemic.

The biggest lesson is perhaps best expressed by the old saying, “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” In any global agreement about how to respond to a pandemic, the standards and priorities should be established according to those countries which are most at risk and have the greatest deficiencies in technical and material resources, and not, as is usually the case, be dictated from positions of relative comfort by the developed nations.

The call for a pandemic treaty is actually not new, despite the subject receiving widespread public attention only this week. Back on March 30, 24 heads of governments issued a joint statement urging the creation of a global agreement; among those from our part of the world who signed the statement were Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha of Thailand, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and President Joko Widodo of Indonesia.

The recommendation received little notice at the time, unfortunately. Thus, the appearance of the Omicron variant is in a sense an object lesson about why the idea should have been given more attention: the unequal distribution of vaccines and other resources to fight the pandemic and the lack of coordination in response measures are what allow potentially dangerous mutations of the coronavirus to develop and spread.

“Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics. Our current system disincentivizes countries from alerting others to threats that will inevitably land on their shores,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said earlier this week.

The reaction to the discovery of the Omicron variant is a good example of why some countries might not want to share information. The discovery was announced by South Africa on November 25, not because the variant necessarily originated in South Africa (although it may have; no one knows for sure yet), but because South Africa conducts more genome sequencing on virus samples than other countries. The immediate response of almost every other country in the world (including the Philippines) was to ban travel from South Africa, leading the latter to complain that it was being punished for making the discovery and implying that it might not be so willing to share the same kind of information again.

Some of the issues that have led to what Tedros characterized as “a splintered and disjointed response, breeding misunderstanding, misinformation and mistrust” to the Covid-19 pandemic include the uneven distribution of materials such as personal protective equipment (PPE), test kits and vaccines; patents and intellectual property issues; a lack of sharing of research and technical knowledge, such as China’s initial attempts to keep the discovery of the coronavirus quiet and subsequent stubborn refusal to allow a proper investigation into its origin; and inconsistency and often conflicting response measures such as travel restrictions, and testing and quarantine requirements.

As we have seen with the spread of Covid-19 in all its variations, leaving any country or region without sufficient resources to respond to the pandemic in the same way as the best-equipped countries simply makes the further spread of the pandemic inevitable. Across Africa, where it is assumed the Omicron variant evolved, the average vaccination rate is only about seven percent, and because of that, the variant has easily found its way to countries that thought they were protected by vaccinating 60 or 70 percent or more of their populations.

By now, every country understands what it needs to fight a pandemic, but the problem that still needs to be solved is that countries do not understand what others need. Therefore, the most vulnerable should be allowed to take the lead in establishing the benchmarks for any global pandemic agreement in order for it to be effective.