“Why was this the worst pandemic in a century?” by Farid Kahhat

I don’t have a clear and definitive answer to that question, but I do have a hypothesis: that of the COVID-19 It would have been the worst pandemic in a century not because of the nature of the virus, but because of the shortcomings in our response to it.

The virus causing the pandemic (SARS-CoV2) is not entirely new: it belongs to the family of coronavirusfrom which both the virus that caused the first pandemic of the 21st century (SARS in 2003) and the regional MERS epidemic in 2012 came from. In fact, one reason why the creation of vaccines against COVID -19 advanced rapidly, it is that it was based on the knowledge already acquired both about that family of viruses (discovered in the 1960s), and about that of its immediate predecessors.

We also know that the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly lower than the one we gave to the second pandemic of the 21st century: H1N1 in 2009. At that time, the World Health Organization (WHO) coordinated the response of governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental, national and international entities, in application of the international health regulation of 2005. Regulation that was signed by 194 countries precisely as a result of learning from the deficiencies in the global response to the SARS pandemic in the 2003. This regulation orders the WHO to coordinate the tasks of prevention, monitoring and response to international pandemics (the WHO is, for example, the one that declares the start of a pandemic).

global governance

That was an example of what in international relations is called international governance. That is, a situation in which, faced with problems that transcend state borders (such as a pandemic or climate change), the solution requires an intermediate authority between an inadequate level of government (the national) and another that does not exist (a world government). There is talk of governance without government because, unlike States, the WHO is not a sovereign entity capable of coercively imposing its decisions. That is, effective international governance depended on the willingness of states to accept his leadership.

And that will was absent in the two main powers of the international system: China and the United States, two countries that represent around 40% of the world economy. In the case of the Chinese Government, it did not timely disclose information that could have been useful in the initial stage of the pandemic (such as the fact that the first recorded case occurred in November 2019, but it took Beijing more than a month to raise the alarm). . Even today, the Xi Jinping government applies sanctions to governments that, like the Australian, are calling for an independent investigation into the origin of the pandemic. As for the government of Donald Trump, it withdrew from the WHO and, with it, deprived that entity of its main source of financing in the midst of a pandemic.

Although the conduct of these powers is vital to explain the deficiency of the response in the first stage of the pandemic, the rest of the powers of the international system did not have a commendable conduct in its later stages either. From banning the export of medical equipment to the hoarding of vaccines, the European Union, Canada and the United Kingdom contributed to creating an atmosphere of every man for himself, where the transnational nature of the problem suggested that salvation had to be collective.

Not in vain one of the purposes of vaccines is to achieve herd immunity: that is, that a large majority of the relevant population acquires immunity against the virus, thus cutting the chain of infection. And, since the prefix ‘pan-‘ in ‘pandemic’ means ‘everyone’, the relevant herd immunity would be that which encompasses the whole of humanity.