The World Health Organisation (WHO) hardly distinguished itself during the Covid 19 pandemic. It was slow to declare an emergency, then tried to make up for the delay by trying to persuade governments to lock down and introduce all kinds of illiberal measures. Worst of all it heaped praise on China’s handling of the epidemic, failing properly to investigate the possibility that the pandemic had originated from a laboratory leak. When it did finally send a team to investigate this, it allowed itself to be pushed around by the Chinese and laughably ruled out the lab leak theory.
None of this, however, has stopped the WHO from trying to get its member states to sign up to a legally -binding agreement as to what should happen in a future pandemic. One of the clauses – which the UK government refuses to agree to – would see rich countries forced to give up 20 per cent of their vaccine supply.
It is a foolish measure, which assumes that it would be appropriate, say, for Britain to give up a fifth of its vaccine supply at a time when it might be most desperately needed here. That was very much the case during Covid 19. It was rich Western countries, with their ageing populations, which suffered most from the disease. Had we been forced, say in January 2021, to surrender one in five doses to developing countries it would have cost more lives in Britain than it saved in the recipient countries. Other diseases, of course, may well be different. If there was an outbreak of Ebola, for example, we would want to rush a vaccine to tropical countries, where the disease tends to thrive, before treating people in the UK. That wouldn’t just be altruism – it would help us, and indeed the entire world, to concentrate vaccination where it was needed most.
We don’t need to sign a WHO treaty to be good global citizens. We already spend billions on public health in the developing world. But as the government argued, we shouldn’t be surrendering our sovereignty for a measure which may very well prove inappropriate in a future pandemic. It is a power grab too far by the WHO.
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