IS there a way out of pandemics? The World Health Organisation (WHO) thinks there is: a pandemic treaty.
And it must be agreed to before the big one — "Disease X" — strikes. "Disease X", in the WHO's calculation, can kill 20 times more than the seven million Covid-19 has killed worldwide.
Don't panic and go out buying up all the masks and other pandemic paraphernalia. It is a hypothetical disease, hence the name X. The WHO's idea is to get the world to be better prepared than it was for the Covid-19. It has been on the WHO's 'coming danger list' for several years.
And since then, the world health body has been trying to marshal its 193 member states — not very successfully, it must be said — to agree to a treaty to fight Disease X. The most recent attempt was last week, but the delegates failed to agree on the terms of the treaty.
The WHO has promised to persevere and is hoping some kind of agreement will be reached when health ministers gather at Geneva's World Health Assembly. The assembly ends tomorrow.
For the good of the world, we hope they do, but with only one day to spare, agreement is a near impossibility. If media reports are right, like the one by The New York Times, negotiators were said to be engaged in fractious debates, sometimes over a single word.
There are a few reasons for this, but three will suffice. Start with the fear that the treaty would erode national interests. Member states treat the WHO's protocols as guidelines, not as mandates.
A treaty will change this making the WHO's rules binding. But the fear of the WHO eroding sovereignty is exaggerated. The pandemic has shown the world the ineffectiveness of global guidelines, but no one is paying attention.
To each its own isn't a wise strategy when tackling a virus that recognises no borders. There needs to be an agreed global strategy on how the global emergency is to be activated. As it is, it is 193 ways to an emergency.
Next on the fear list is that a pandemic treaty will compel nations, especially those that host Big Pharma, to share vaccines at cost with countries that can ill afford them.
We saw this vaccine nationalism, at least in the early phase of the pandemic, when vaccine manufacturing countries hoarded them for their own people. Big Pharma, too, is pushing governments to not concede to this term for fear that it would erode its fat profits.
At least one million people around the world were said to have died because of vaccine nationalism. This has led some countries to not want to share data on pathogens, our third reason. Such reluctance is not baseless. During the pandemic, some countries did share this information, but they didn't derive any benefits from the vaccines produced using the pathogenic data provided to them.
What was worse, the very same countries were forced by Big Pharma to pay prohibitive prices for the vaccines. Getting 193 countries to agree to a treaty isn't going to be easy.
Usually it takes years. And even when agreement is reached, policing it is an issue. If there is no political will, there will never be a way.