Omicron Demonstrates World Needs a New Accord on Pandemics, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Who Director-General

(Special Correspondent)

• COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated fundamental weaknesses in the global architecture for pandemic preparedness and response
• Global health security is too important to be left to chance, or goodwill, or shifting geopolitical currents, or the vested interests of companies and shareholders
• The best way we can address them is with a legally binding agreement between nations; an accord forged from the recognition that we have no future but a common future
• Then surely – surely – the time has come for countries to agree on a common, binding approach to a common threat that we cannot fully control nor prevent – a threat that comes from our relationship with nature itself
• The emergence of the highly-mutated Omicron variant underlines just how perilous and precarious our situation is. South Africa and Botswana should be thanked for detecting, sequencing and reporting this variant, not penalized
• Indeed, Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics: our current system disincentivizes countries from alerting others to threats that will inevitably land on their shores
• In less than a year, almost 8 billion vaccines have been administered around the world – the largest vaccination campaign in history.  But a year ago, as we began to see some countries striking bilateral deals with manufacturers, we warned that the poorest and most vulnerable would be trampled in the global stampede for vaccines
• More than 80% of the world’s vaccines have gone to G20 countries; low-income countries, most of them in Africa, have received just 0.6% of all vaccines.  But vaccine equity is not charity; it’s in every country’s best interests
• We call on every Member State to support the targets to vaccinate 40% of the population of every country by the end of this year, and 70% by the middle of next year. 103 countries still have not reached the 40% target, and more than half of them are at risk of missing it by the end of the year, simply because they cannot access the vaccines they need
• WHO’s position remains that health workers, older people and other at-risk groups must be vaccinated first in all countries before those at low risk of serious disease, and before boosters are given to already-vaccinated healthy adults

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world… There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. “Those words were written by the French writer Albert Camus in his classic novel La Peste – The Plague – in 1947.Seventy-four years later, they have a disturbing prescience. Outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics are a fact of nature, and a recurring feature of recorded history, from the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE, to the Black Death, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and now COVID-19. But that does not mean we are helpless to prevent them, prepare for them or mitigate their impact. We are not prisoners of fate or nature. More than any humans in history, we have the ability to anticipate pandemics, to prepare for them, to unravel the genetics of pathogens, to detect them at their earliest stages, to prevent them spiralling into global disasters, and to respond when they do. And yet here we are, entering the third year of the most acute health crisis in a century, and the world remains in its grip. This pestilence – one that we can prevent, detect and treat – continues to cast a long shadow over the world. Instead of meeting in the aftermath of the pandemic, we are meeting as a fresh wave of cases and deaths crashes into Europe, with untold and uncounted deaths around the world. And although other regions are seeing declining or stable trends, if there’s one thing we have learned, it’s that no region, no country, no community and no individual is safe until we are all safe. The emergence of the highly-mutated Omicron variant underlines just how perilous and precarious our situation is. South Africa and Botswana should be thanked for detecting, sequencing and reporting this variant, not penalized. Indeed, Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics: our current system disincentivizes countries from alerting others to threats that will inevitably land on their shores. We don’t yet know whether Omicron is associated with more transmission, more severe disease, more risk of reinfections, or more risk of evading vaccines. Scientists at WHO and around the world are working urgently to answer these questions. We shouldn’t need another wake-up call; we should all be wide awake to the threat of this virus. But Omicron’s very emergence is another reminder that although many of us might think we are done with COVID-19, it is not done with us. We are living through a cycle of panic and neglect. Hard-won gains could vanish in an instant. Our most immediate task, therefore, is to end this pandemic.