“Covid-19: Make it the Last Pandemic” is a pretty good title for a needed discussion for how to get ahead of the coronavirus and all its cousins. It is the title of a report, published on May 12, commissioned by the World Health Organization, and carried out by their “Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.” Helen Clark, a former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, were the co-chairs of the panel. They found that the pandemic was preventable, but that governments were “inconsistent and underfunded” and their response slow and weak. Rather, heads of state and government need to oversee preparations and provide financial backing to protect against viral threats. https://theindependentpanel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/COVID-19-Make-it-the-Last-Pandemic_final.pdf
However, their language of “transformational change” to prevent pandemics, it turns out, has nothing to do with old-fashioned notions of public health, such as hospitals, electricity, clean water, etc. Rather, the focus is upon an early alert system to identify the quasi-epidemics before they can spread into a pandemic, and to put out the fires as they arise. Previous institutional responses, such as that mounted against the 2014 Ebola crisis, have taken a few months too long; so, a body with permanent financing, ready to hand out checks early in the process, will save time, lives, and money. They call for the G7 and wealthier countries to put up much more money, on the argument that they have more to lose if another pandemic kicks in. The new institution would be called an “International Pandemic Preparedness and Response Financial Facility.”
