United States: A global treaty to contain and prevent future infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19 is unfortunately going to have to wait.
Despite the long and laborious attempt to convince diplomats and civil society activists, the rich and the poor countries have not yet come to a compromise — if only for now — about how mankind can gear itself to face the difficulty of the next pandemic.
News Overview
Following the COVID-19 outbreak that shut down businesses, schools and totally annihilated global economies as well as claimed millions of lives globally, directors at the World Health Organization and other leaders of the world and various local nations vowed to do better this next time, according to US News.
Member countries desired the UN health agency to track the negotiation of the response in order to realize how this small volume of text could be structured organisationally to avoid other future pathogens to turn global in 2021.
On Friday, Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board, informed an audience that no draft could yet be presented to nations. The WHO had initially hoped to endorse a final treaty at the annual health ministers’ conference starting Monday in Geneva, US News reported.
Driece said, “We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” and added that finalizing an international agreement on how to react to a pandemic was critical “for the sake of humanity.”
Driece also mentioned that the World Health Assembly next week will discuss the issues that the world went through and the steps to look forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to take this process forward” to one day reach a pandemic agreement “because we need it.”
Draft Treaty Details
The draft treaty aimed to address the disparity in COVID-19 vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries, which WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called “a catastrophic moral failure.”
He said, “We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” and “Because many of the challenges that caused a serious impact during COVID-19 still exist.”
The accord’s goal was to establish a unified guideline for WHO members to respond to future pandemics by better-sharing resources. However, experts warned that these efforts would be futile without compliance from all countries.