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.