If a “pandemic treaty” fails to account for the dismal international response to COVID-19 and isn’t focused on preventing future pandemics, is it really a “pandemic treaty”? Yet that’s the current state of a draft “pandemic treaty” being negotiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization.
The failures of the international health system’s response to COVID-19 are well-established. China failed to inform the international community of the outbreak of the new disease in a timely manner, as required by the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations, a provision established because of Beijing’s cover-up of the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
China mischaracterized COVID-19, saying there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission—a deadly lie that the WHO parroted unquestioningly.
The failures didn’t stop there. China didn’t expeditiously share genomic data on the new coronavirus and didn’t allow prompt access to research labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology by an international expert team. China also shut down internal travel while allowing international travel, turning a local outbreak into a global pandemic.
To date, the Chinese government has refused to allow an unfettered, independent international investigation into the origins of COVID-19, which even Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director-general, has called for.