The World Health Organization announced that negotiations on a draft agreement to better combat the next pandemic will begin on February next year.
The 194 member states of the World Health Organization have been thrashing out a pandemic treaty over the week, with the goal of making sure that the flawed response that turned COVID-19 into a global crisis would never happen again.
On the final day of negotiations, they “agreed to develop the first draft of a legally binding agreement designed to protect the world from future pandemics,” the WHO said in a statement. This ‘zero draft’ of the pandemic accord, rooted in the WHO Constitution, will be discussed on February 27, 2023.
The announcement comes as the third anniversary of COVID-19 emerging from China approaches, from where it spread around the world, causing the worst pandemic in a century. The virus has killed 6.6 million people, cost countries trillions of dollars, and laid bare the inequities in access to healthcare and medicine around the world.
The impact of the pandemic “on human lives, economies and societies at large must never be forgotten,” said Precious Matsoso of South Africa, a member of a WHO negotiating body that will be working on the draft.
“The best chance we have, today, as a global community, to prevent a repeat of the past is to come together… and develop a global accord that safeguards societies from future pandemic threats,” she added.
The challenge with coming up with a global accord is finding a balance between something bold and with teeth, and something that all countries can agree to.
Because hindsight is 20/20, we are now able to see where the response of the global community went terribly wrong and how COVID-19 was able to wreak so much havoc. It is painfully obvious by now that the nations of the earth need to come to an agreement on how to prevent the next one, which is inevitable given the way we have been abusing this planet, its environment and its inhabitants, from unleashing the same damage.*
