Online Reporter
COVID-19 was a wake-up call for much of the world showing just how fast and far a major pandemic could move and, despite incredible efforts in several countries to develop vaccines, just how long it took these to reach the poorest.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) did so much to effectively coordinate responses, lay out the basic public health measures such as masking and as much lockdown as possible, approve vaccines for international use and work out ways of getting critical resources to the poorest.
At the same time, even during the pandemic, WHO saw the need to upgrade much of the international agreement and use the experience of so many. This would be in designing better ways of responding. Very often in pandemic we must have a reasonable plan and access to at least the basic resources plus high levels of research for vaccines and ways of increasing production of essential medical materials, vaccines and medicines.
The more that can be done in advance the better, allowing the emergency response to kick in at a far higher intensity sooner. At the same time, we need responses that slow the rate of spreading and if possible prevent infections.
All the lessons learned are now being brought together with the new WHO Pandemic Agreement by member states, basically everyone except the United States.
This extremely practical agreement advances the lessons learned, addresses gross inequalities, and looks at how WHO, Governments, health experts, civil society and the private sector can all cooperate to prevent if possible a future pandemic, minimise the disaster if there is one and make sure all responses are more effective.
During Covid-19 even the best off countries would have been able to react more quickly if they had been better prepared.
While China and much of Europe moved fairly swiftly to bring in lockdowns and were better prepared that most with adequate equipment, even they could probably have moved faster and wanted more available.
The United States was surprisingly unprepared and had problems with basic public health measures that would have reduced the pandemic’s effects and fatalities with even the richest country in the world short of essential medical equipment.
Vaccine research was carried out in several major countries, using different approaches so there was some insurance against failures and which did eventually produced enough vaccine for most of those who wanted them.
But the major nations which had the vaccines first tended to, quite naturally, restrict exports at the beginning and there were attempts in some areas to divert supplies to richer countries.
As with most countries, Zimbabwe was not that well-prepared, but at least President Mnangagwa and his Government were committed to following the science, taking the best local and WHO advice, and then mobilising the country to pull through.
And most importantly the authorities were prepared to move quickly and enforce the best preventative measures, many of which did not need money, but rather following medical rules.
A lot of things were done properly, and the upgrade of hospitals, some clinics and other medical facilities are permanent.
At the same time that highly effective response also saw other countries prepared to allocate scarce resources such as some free vaccines but the bulk from an agreement by China to allow the sale of rationed vaccines at a normal price, rather than scarcity pricing. That allowed mass vaccination.
One area where the new WHO rules can build is that almost all countries, even the poorest, now have effective vaccination chains for the common childhood illnesses after almost 40 years of intense effort by WHO and Unicef.
This does provide at least some of the required infrastructure for future mass vaccination programmes if new diseases emerge, narrowing the requirement to making sure the vaccines can be fed into the programmes.
Requirements, as Africa noted, do need to look at pandemics that might largely affect Africans with the same degree of seriousness. We have seen with Ebola and now Mpox that they can be some shrugging of shoulders unless these diseases suddenly break free of Africa.
This to a large extent needs a more co-ordinated African response but with that sort of response we could and should expect more international support.
As Zimbabwe has found, if you have good local health programmes then those with limited resources for foreign support will prefer to reinforce local success.
Africa cannot and should not rely on non-Africans to keep the people healthy and should be building up more of what is needed on the continent.
Often we would need to plug into global research, as receivers as well as contributors, but if we have a decent pharmaceutical industry we would then be just getting licences to makes some of the newest drugs and vaccines, and in a pandemic expanding production in the factories making basic medical consumables.
So the WHO Pandemic Agreement should also be localised to Africa and to each country so that we have a continent and a country are following the latest science and recommendations, and that in a pandemic we are pulling our weight.
