WHO agrees to study reforms suggested by health experts, to meet again on pandemic treaty

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Sunday agreed to study recommendations from the independent global health experts and scientists to make ambitious reforms pitched to strengthen the UN agency and member states. This comes ahead of the health ministers' meeting of the 194 member countries scheduled for November 29 this year. "We really do welcome the recommendations within the resolutions and also the decision to take this forward to an international agreement or framework convention on preparedness and response for pandemics," WHO's emergencies director Mike Ryan told its annual ministerial assembly in a live-streamed address. 

WHO‘s emergency director said that he welcomes the decisions, as he told the health ministerial assembly in a virtual conference, “Right now the pathogens have the upper hand, they are emerging more frequently and often silently in a planet that is out of balance.” He stressed, “We need to turn that very thing that has exposed us in this pandemic, our interconnectedness, we need to turn that into a strength.” 

A panel headed by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia,  stated that the new systems must be in place that can respond faster to disease outbreaks in order to prevent the future coronavirus and other pandemic outbreaks. The decisions, approved in the committee, will be formally adopted in the plenary later on Monday which will be addressed by WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, according to multiple reports.

Experts outline loopholes in WHO COVID response

Experts have highlighted various loopholes and failures in the WHO’s global response in early 2020 to the coronavirus outbreak. The experts demand that the WHO must have independent power to quickly dispatch investigators and publish accurate findings related to future outbreaks. “A pandemic treaty under the roof of the WHO is the preferred way forward to strengthen the multilateral health architecture including the IHR (International Health Regulations) and to heed the call by so many experts to reset the system,” Chile’s ambassador Frank Tressler Zamorano said on behalf of 60 countries in the conference. 

“The world was hit by this virus unprepared. And if another virus emerged tomorrow this would still be the case,” Björn Kümmel, deputy head of the global health division at Germany’s federal health ministry, told the WHO’s virtual talks. “A green light for this treaty process is the greatest commitment to learn from this crisis that this Assembly could have sent out. It the most effective way to make sure that the global health crisis becomes the final one,” he added.