I would argue the opposite - the world needs less collaboration [coercion] in pandemic response. Having the WHO bludgeon countries into obeying standards set by a small committee of elites is an abuse of power waiting to happen.

A terrible take. We are fully connected to a point that national borders mean practically nothing. Only a coordinated response and open sharing of information can stop a disaster.

Centralization is a surefire way to fail at pandemic response. You will necessarily be pressuring the wrong intervention measures on people who don't want them when they could stand to intervene in a better way for their own region and serve as a datapoint for the rest of the world to learn from.

You can't sacrifice the superior computational power of decentralized peoples acting in their best interest and substitute it with some truly wishful thinking that there will exist some superior knowledge that just needs centralized power in order to control a pandemic.

I think centralization could work quite well, it just hasn't in practice. When thinking of benevolent dictators, there's obviously some advantage there compared to uncoordinated decentralization.

That said, I'm not stupid enough to think that's a good idea, and welcome any innovations in decentralized coordination.

If the WHO actually prioritized "sharing information" over the political machinations of the Chinese government, you wouldn't have the spectacle of Bruce Aylward pretending to have technical difficulties when someone mentions the word 'Taiwan' on a call, and the fear of political oppression by committee would be a lot less credible.

This situation is, of course, a tragedy, but it is also what we have.

I'm sure plenty of authoritarian regimes would love to have information on all sorts of things that health agencies could be made to collect by treaty. How about just "travel?" Let's track the movement of every person from place to place. It's for the pandemic! It's definitely is not part of a surveillance apparatus meant to stifle dissent, not in the slightest.

Climate scientist here. I have some bad news for you… Don’t expect open sharing of information to stop your disaster any time soon.

Unfortunately, the way we handled this is to me ample proof that climate change will happen and that we as humanity won't do a thing to stop it beyond some symbolic moves. In short, we're fucked. But some people will make bank while selling the rest of the world down the river.

Really the big one here, I feel, is the open sharing of information. This is probably the single most effective thing there is. Free and open information that anyone has access to. If there is one thing WHO should be, is an international database for medical researchers, advisers and professionals around the world.

From telling people it wasn’t airborne and they shouldn’t wear masks to saying no booster shots, their credibility is toast.

All those points are taken out of context and are misleading.

Are they still saying it’s “impossible” the virus escaped from a Chinese weapons lab?

As a biologist looking at comments like these make me concerned that the general public has not learned its lesson on pandemics yet. It is far more concerning our destruction of the environment and our encroachment of habitats will lead to way more pandemics.

I’m very much concerned with our government funding gof research in a foreign and adversarial weapons laboratory. Stopping that research would be a very important lesson to learn in this pandemic because it might actually be able to stop the next covid 19.

Yes, stopping such research is important.

But it has nothing to do with COVID-19.

Am I to believe that China was working on weaponizing a virus without also concurrently researching a cure/vaccine?

Virus provenance is important. It’s not a blame game. If it escapes from a lab they owe the world every piece of research they have on it but we’ll never get there if everyone says “hey hey let’s not play the blame game here”

No, you are not to believe that, there is no evidence for it. But there is plenty of evidence that nation states in general have done research on the weaponizing of disease.

Note that that doesn't rule out that it wasn't the case, but it is to the best of my knowledge not something that we have even a shred of direct evidence for.

Of all the problems international cooperation could tackle, pandemics seem like they should be the easiest.

Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances.

Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one.

And finally, you're dealing with something that is generally agreed on: dead humans are bad and to be avoided.

Godspeed to those trying to broker consensus.

I really wish that we had a collective, global experience during the COVID-19 pandemic that made everyone trust that the national and international authorities had all of our best interests at heart and that they would implement controls fairly and judiciously with constant monitoring of efficacy and incremental improvement of methods, communication with honesty and transparency, and above all, respecting individuals.

However, correct or incorrect, this has not been the experience of many during this pandemic. So there can be no surrender of sovereignty, personal or otherwise, from a large enough portion of the population, which would make any attempt at international control pointless at best, and tyrannical and horrific at worse.

I truly hope that the governments of the world learn from their mistakes instead of blindly pushing forward with their current approach.

> Either you are dealing with one, or you aren't. Pretty stark contrast. So should make countries more comfortable ceding sovereignty, knowing it's going to be only in exceptional circumstances.

Without a hard metric it's a slippery slope and governments will not cede emergency powers. That's been the history of nearly all emergency powers. Ask yourself how long this pandemic will last and whether anyone will agree upon criteria for its end.

I feel like this argument is still in bad faith. A co-worker last year was talking about how a mask mandate was the biggest violation of freedom ever in American history. So I kindly reminded my co-worker, internment camps for Japanese-americans were less of a violation? Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the civil war? Those are just two examples of many. These were all moves made by emergency powers that were...... given up by government when the situation ended.

Emergency powers from the Patriot Act are still in effect.

The problem this pandemic (and pandemics in general) is that there is no defined end and no one seems to be willing to create one. It is either a certain number of deaths per million or zero (eradication), which would put us in smallpox territory - about two centuries.

I do think the patriot act is a good counter example. However I think this is probably because of the point you made in the second paragraph. "There is no defined end." This is true, with COVID and the patriot act. Unfortunately, I think a reason why is because if someone defines and end point, it comes and various things are repealed and something happens, it is a career ender. Taking the Patriot Act as an example because I think it is probably the most clear cut. If tomorrow a group of politicians ended the patriot act on the premise that, no planes have smashed into buildings because of terrorists in two decades, great. But a year later, a plane crashes into a skyscraper, where will society put them blame? Unfortunately, on those politicians more than likely. Not even just planes smashing into buildings, if suddenly a suicide bomber blows off in a town square, there will be lots of people up in arms about the Patriot act being ended. Which is unfortunate, but it creates a situation where I see no politician wants to put a stake in the ground of, "this is the goal." I think propaganda by political parties (both, not a single) is to thank for that largely.

I agree, and it is largely unfixable. An additional problem comes in when people profit from the emergency powers being in place. Someone always will. Profit isn't only monetary.

"The fact that humans are the only reservoir for smallpox infection and that carriers did not exist, played a significant role in the eradication of smallpox." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Eradication

SARS-CoV-2 eradication is probably impossible.

Yup. And that's why I would not want to see a treaty. Better to have nations acting independently of each other at the policy level, learning from each other's experiences. It's like a market where nations can explore different tradeoffs in how they declare an end or live with it.

What if my tradeoff is "I will partially vaccinate everyone in my country and not perform any surveillance, tracking, or sequencing and stockpile any critical PPE and prohibit export of vaccines"?

Absurd example, but that seems pretty harmful to every country with transportation links to me.

There's the concept of a border. They have liabilities but they have benefits too. We are too used to thinking of them as completely bad.

> Coupled with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has proven that even the most stringent border lockdowns fail in the face of highly transmissible, asymptomatic threats. Which makes this an "everyone" problem instead of a "head in the sand is okay" one.

The “most stringent border lockdowns” didn’t happen, at least not in a timely way. The WHO is one reason why - even at the end of January 2020 they recommended against countries taking measures like border closures. The US travel ban didn’t get implemented until February 2020, and it still had various exemptions and tens of thousands of travelers from Hubei continued to pour into the US. What really should have happened is that China should have voluntarily shut down all their international ports in mid-December 2019. Unfortunately even though China shut down some domestic flights in January 2020, they didn’t shut international flights until March 2020 (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...), following a call between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.

in January 2020, nobody, including you thought this was going to go as far and as fast as it did. By then, very likely the cat was already out of the bag and a worldwide travel ban would have helped but would not have prevented the pandemic outright. Was this a mistake? Yes, because that decision violates the cautionary principle when dealing with novel diseases. The WHO was concerned with being found to be 'alarmist' but this time around that would have been the right position to take. Ironically had they done so and prevented the pandemic from spreading you would now be berating them for being such idiots that they caused us all to stop traveling for nothing in 2020, on account of the prevention paradox. And that makes you part of the problem: there is nothing that the WHO could have done that in your eyes would have been a proportional response, and when you are dealing with a novel pathogen mistakes are inevitable.

A bit of restraint and some more thinking about this on your part would go a long way towards a more reasonable stance. But those that see the UN and the WHO as the root of all evil tend to do everything they can to avoid seeing reason, instead everything gets bent to the 'UN bad' talking point.

It's the cancelling school (or work) for snow problem in a nutshell.

If you cancel, and there is no snow, you've caused economic damage, which has very real health consequences.

If you don't cancel, and there is heavy snow, you've caused physical damage, with very real health consequences.

Implementing full international pandemic prevention protocols in a timely manner was probably realistically impossible, given it's never been done in the 21st century.

But beyond that, it's questionable whether making the decision at the time, knowing what was known about SARS-CoV-2, was even a justifiable call. For the reasons you mentioned.

And not just because of the alarmist factor, but because of very real (and sometimes lethal) consequences of implementing them. And I don't think there was a case for preemptively being that aggressive, given MERS and SARS-CoV-1 were both regionally contained.

Point of order- The most stringent border lockdowns actually worked shockingly well, see New Zealand, for example.

Also “you are either in a pandemic, or you aren’t” isn’t the important part of a response framework. The far more important part is preventing novel diseases from becoming a pandemic in the first place, even if they have the potential to be.

New Zealand isn't very representative of the world, geographically and in effective population density.

Coupled with the fact that it's a fundamentally unstable system to mate "highly transmissible pathogen" with "single layer of protection." There's a reason network security is migrating to zero trust, and it shares many parallels with pandemic modeling.

Yes, border lockdowns will work if a country gets lucky. How long can they stay lucky?

I'm also suspicious we can identify novel diseases fast enough (presumably in animal reservoirs) fast enough to be effective. There are too many unseen places on this planet, and pathogens evolve too quickly. Again, it only takes one.

What should be boosted and universalized is disease surveillance. The patchwork (nationally and internationally) systems for stitching together sample -> testing -> result communication could bear a lot of improvement.

> even the most stringent border lockdowns fail

Except we never had a serious lockdown. Most businesses were still open because of loose terms of what is essential or finding loopholes like bars serving food with beer so they can be considered a restaurant and other ridiculous things.

It is worth refreshing the memory about how the WHO handled the initial stages of the pandemic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c07MnRmJPcI

While I am OK with science being wrong and then corrected, WHO has eroded public trust in staying objective and seeking truth.