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Earth Science

Countries Fail To Agree on Treaty To Prepare the World for the Next Pandemic (nytimes.com) 112

Countries around the globe have failed to reach consensus on the terms of a treaty that would unify the world in a strategy against the inevitable next pandemic, trumping the nationalist ethos that emerged during Covid-19. From a report: The deliberations, which were scheduled to be a central item at the weeklong meeting of the World Health Assembly beginning Monday in Geneva, aimed to correct the inequities in access to vaccines and treatments between wealthier nations and poorer ones that became glaringly apparent during the Covid pandemic. Although much of the urgency around Covid has faded since the treaty negotiations began two years ago, public health experts are still acutely aware of the pandemic potential of emerging pathogens, familiar threats like bird flu and mpox, and once-vanquished diseases like smallpox.

"Those of us in public health recognize that another pandemic really could be around the corner," said Loyce Pace, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, who oversees the negotiations in her role as the United States liaison to the World Health Organization. Negotiators had hoped to adopt the treaty next week. But canceled meetings and fractious debates -- sometimes over a single word -- stalled agreement on key sections, including equitable access to vaccines. The negotiating body plans to ask for more time to continue the discussions.

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Countries Fail To Agree on Treaty To Prepare the World for the Next Pandemic

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  • See, we as a species were too unruly for the World Government to fully control during the last pandemic. Some countries didn't even require masks!

    So by "prepare", they plan to install Running-Man style explosive collars on every human on Earth, so that at last we will all comply.

    So what's the disagreement? Well you see, some government groups want the collars to be purple, and others black. Until they can come to an agreement I guess the lot of us will have to remain sadly un-controlled.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, the disagreement was about the WHO's ability to control a nation, subverting its sovereignty. Fuck those unelected Eurocrats.
      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by jdawgnoonan ( 718294 )
        I do not live in a country that requires help from WHO. I certainly do not support my government (USA) being a part of this.
      • by troff ( 529250 )

        "control a nation".
        WHAT CONTROL EXACTLY HAVE THEY GOT OVER ANY NATION? THEY CAN'T EVEN PUT RULES IN PLACE TO DEAL WITH THE NEXT POPULATION-KILLING PANDEMIC.

        If you're too far gone out of your skull to realise there's NO EVIDENCE of any of the things you're worried about, it's a shame the last pandemic didn't take care of you.

        And you don't know what side of the political fence I'm on. My problem with you is the fact you can't look at evidence AFTER THE FACT in front of you.

        And before you do anything other tha

      • Remember, WHO pressing China for proper response during first SARS outbreak (SARS-CoV-1) was what prevented world-wide pandemic.
        Accidentally, then director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland, a woman, had significantly more balls that the current pushover Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, whose kowtowing to China let the COVID (SARS-CoV-2) spread.

        So yes, national governments sometimes have to be told by a supranational organisation to do things right.

  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Friday May 24, 2024 @05:32PM (#64497101) Homepage
    Ground the fucking planes.
    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by RitchCraft ( 6454710 )

      It was too late for that to prevent Covid. China being China kept it quiet for too long. Maybe next time China will report the situation earlier? Bwahahaha yea, right.

      • by HBI ( 10338492 )

        I'm not 100% certain the US would have done any better in terms of notification. Politics certainly would have intervened here also, as it did when the response was being discussed in Winter 2020. Also, before the Chinese really knew what they had unleashed they were 3 months into spread. Whatever they had done, it was too late to nip the thing in the bud. This is why the responses we'd trained for, for many years before, setting up roadblocks and isolating the outbreak region, were not implemented as t

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          I saw the outbreak happen in Canada. You know where it started? A dentist's convension.

          First one case of COVID. Then another case, then five more cases. All traced to people who attended the convention. But by then it's too late - because the convention was over, so everyone who was at that convention passed it to each other, then flew home, spread it to the rest of Canada, or flew home, and spread it to the people in the airplanes who then spread it around the world.

          It was traced back to doctors attending

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            The UK had a similar thing, with a horse racing event that became the first big super-spreader. People from a wide area in attendance, no protection at all, took it home with them.

            There are two lessons to learn from these events. Firstly, you have to introduce measures to limit the spread early. Masks, testing, unlimited paid time off work, that sort of thing.

            Secondly, most Western countries are screwed because too many people will prioritize their own convenience over protecting others, sooner or later. It

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 )

        But it wasn't too late to start taking precautions. I was traveling internationally in the fall of 2019, when it wasn't yet "COVID 19" and wasn't even narrowed down to a coronavirus; but just some minor bit story for slow international news days about a particularly bad strain of the flu making the rounds in China and southeast Asia. But even then, before it blew up, before all the hullabaloo, before the New Year, Japan, Korea, and Singapore (Maybe more, but I personally witnessed them at those three.) al

        • In Thailand the Infrared arches are still everywhere. With a security guard.
          They had many Covid dead again. I know people who had Covid now 3 times. Many people voluntary wear masks.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Is that right? I was in Japan in December 2019 to January 2020, and don't recall it being a big deal. There was some stuff on the news about it, and they had been routinely doing basic thermal imaging of arrivals since the Bird Flu outbreak, but I don't remember any restrictions or new measures.

      • It was too late for that to prevent Covid. China being China kept it quiet for too long.

        It wasn't too late and a number of countries (Taiwan / Ghana etc.) showed that it could be kept under full control for much longer. The thing people keep forgetting is that in March 2020 when decisions first started being made, none of the advanced highly infectious variants we had to deal with later existed.

        Speaking as a Brit, the really annoying thing is that no real decision was made. There was not a calculation "how deadly is this really" / "can we stop this" / "what are the consequences". Instead Boris

        • The delay by the authorities, especially WHO contributed to the spread. WHO kept denying it was a pandemic even though it clearly was. Whether it was a bureaucrat who had to wait for just the right number of indicators to call it, or politicos that wanted to avoid any harm to global business interests, it is clear they didn't want to call it like it was.
          Common sense measures to show the spread could have given us time to understand it before so damn many people caught it and so many died.
          We learned quickly,

      • Oh BS that it was China's fault. We still don't know for certain that it originated there as the virus has been found in sewagewater samples in Italy in europe well before (august) it had hit China, and in october before it hit China there were military (olympic like) games in Wuhan where also military from europe attended. It's especially the US that again is pointing fingers that it might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan. But publicly we still haven't got clue where it really originated. And funny enough,
    • Or don't make exceptions - like banning passengers coming from China, unless they are Americans. It wouldn't have kept out the virus forever but it could have bought some more preparation time if we shut the main door instead of just the screen door. Of course, when presented with the task of leadership some will rise to the challenge and others will just repeat misinformation from Twitter.

      • You don't have to ban those passengers, but you do have to isolate and quarantine them. It's flatly wrong to ban them, but you could charge them for costs. I think that's pretty wrong too, but it's consistent with capitalist accounting.

        • You don't have to ban those passengers, but you do have to isolate and quarantine them.

          This. If things are at the point where we're banning people from certain countries from traveling to our own to limit the spread of a disease then we sure as shit should be quarantining our own people returning from said country. There's no need to strand them in a foreign country but not quarantining them is an utter failure in regards to risk reduction.

        • I thought they weren't even required to quarantine...

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Could they even legally do that? Banning American citizens from returning would seem to be very problematic, e.g. most of them would only have temporary visas for China and would face arrest and deportation if they overstayed. Maybe the Chinese could be persuaded to be lenient, but even then they would have jobs and businesses in the US that they could lose if stuck outside the country.

        China actually had the right idea there. Citizens could return, but had to do two weeks in home quarantine. Local governmen

        • No one got banned or deported from Thailand. They could extend there visa exemptions ora any real visa indefinitely.
          Many stayed the whole time, because there where no real flights going out anyway.
          Land borders were closed, expect for trade.
          The surrounding countries had similar restrictions.
          Vietnam closed its borders to China instantly when the first hospital satellite photos with crowded parking lots showed up.

  • for profit health care needs to go away!

    • for profit health care needs to go away!

      It won't go away though. Profit is a very powerful motivator, and if there's some law against providing health care for profit then it will just go underground.

      It will be easier to get the medicines and devices we want for our healthcare as time moves on because with an increase in communications from the Internet, the improvements in technologies like 3D printing, and the increasing wealth of the population that comes with the application of these technologies in markets other than healthcare, it will be

  • Hopefully a virus will reduce world population to 500M so that the world is sustainable. 8B people is too g-d damn much. IMHO.
    • Your solution is about to be hammered down by the populationist mods. Don't you know everything must constantly expand or the economy will collapse?
    • by The Cat ( 19816 )

      I drove from L.A. to Provo, Utah once. After I crossed the first county line it was eight solid hours of cows, fences, distant mountains and grass. About every 20 minutes I saw another car.

      Weren't another #%(&%%@$ thing until I crossed the city limits 700 miles later.

      The entire population of the world could live comfortably in Texas. If we added Oklahoma they could all have swimming pools. 8 billion people is nothing on a planet this size.

      • There's not enough water between L.A. and Utah to support the people already living there.

        • There's not enough water between L.A. and Utah to support the people already living there.

          California has an infinite amount of water. All it is short of is the energy to desalinate it.

      • by dfm3 ( 830843 )
        That's an extreme oversimplification though.

        Sure everyone could fit into a house comfortably in that space, but each of us has a footprint that requires land beyond our backyard for growing food, producing electricity, disposing of waste, among other things.

        And that land has to be suitable for the purpose. A vast majority of earth's surface is either covered by salt water, or is not arable for one reason or another. If you actually saw next to nothing for 700 miles I'd assume you didn't go through Vegas b
      • And, yet, we're still managing to fk up the planet.
    • Hopefully a virus will reduce world population to 500M so that the world is sustainable. 8B people is too g-d damn much. IMHO.

      The Greens' wet dream is genocide on a scale orders of magnitude beyond Hitler or Hamas.

    • If you think like that, why don't you start with you and your family? 8bn isn't a problem as long as people help each other, north and south, west and east. The problem lies with having all these separate countries wanting their own thing, while these borders are created artificially anyway by war and greed in the past (or present). As long as we still think in separate countries it will be a problem.
    • Is that you, Thanos?

      Let me guess, youâ(TM)d be among the 500m surviving of courseâ¦

  • Early detection coupled with quarantines and contact tracing can reduce the spread of novel viruses. We had a system in place to do just that before the orange traitor dismantled it. And for some reason he removed our CDC inspectors from china. Those were our people, but the orange traitor would rather take the word of china over our scientists.
  • ... so lets just let nature take it's course this time.
  • Good riddance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Friday May 24, 2024 @06:56PM (#64497303)

    Nice to see this failed. I don't support this sort of socialism on a global scale nor the blatant disregard for individual rights. Countries concerned about others hoarding treatments should develop their own medical and pharmaceutical industries so that they don't have to rely on third parties. If a poor tiny island nation with 11 million people subject to US sanctions can develop an effective covid vaccine there is little excuse this success couldn't have been widely replicated.

    Competition is good for everyone. It results in better products, lower prices preventing the insane levels of corruption and price gouging we've all come to expect from western medical industry. Competition also ensures in a crisis you have organic capability to respond without relying on other countries. It means you have the enabling knowledge and industrial base to competently contribute to any collective efforts rather than simply waiting for handouts. When SHTF good luck getting any country to act against their self-interest regardless of what any treaty says when people are dying in droves. The covid pandemic was literally a rounding error compared to what kind of toll is possible during any future pandemic.

    If such capabilities were in place globally we wouldn't have had massive corporations using the pandemic as an excuse to fund the scaling out of a technology platform that has never before seen widespread use. One that incidentally carries a 4x unit cost and absurd cold chain requirements that exacerbated already fragile supply chains.

    Had that initial CapEx gone into traditional protein analogue vaccines the Indians alone could have dedicated a small percentage of their capacity to make enough for the world and done so faster, cheaper and safer.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I don't support this sort of socialism

      Vaccines are probably one of the very best examples of how working together against a pandemic is both the morally and economically right thing to do. We should have started mass producing those vaccines as widely as possible, patent and royalty free. Compensate the developers, of course, but it would have greatly lessened the economic harm that was done.

      Don't be afraid of socialism. It works really well for some things.

      • Vaccines are probably one of the very best examples of how working together against a pandemic is both the morally and economically right thing to do.

        We should have started mass producing those vaccines as widely as possible, patent and royalty free. Compensate the developers, of course, but it would have greatly lessened the economic harm that was done.

        Don't be afraid of socialism. It works really well for some things.

        I don't believe in fairy tales.

        Between the US and Europe we were talking about second doses, vaccinating kids, boosters and allowing unused stocks to expire while entire continents were being drip fed scraps insufficient even to cover those of advanced age. The first dose of any vaccine large swaths of the world received was "Omicron". Dozens of governments around the world took action to limit the exportation of PPE and basic medical supplies on national security grounds.

        The critical issue isn't coordina

  • Locked down in Melbourne for 2 years. It should never have happened, next time they try that there will be rioting/an overthrow of the government. The main lesson from COVID is people have to be allowed to manage their own health. The state should not be getting involved except to provide resources on a voluntary basis. The government cannot and does not know what is best for everyone on an individual level. They also cannot be allowed to exercise power the way they did. The cost to the public was too high.
    • by troff ( 529250 )

      > The main lesson from COVID is people have to be allowed to manage their own health

      You mean, like the brilliant job People did last time?

      > The government cannot and does not know what is best for everyone on an individual level

      Which is why things like "okay, you can have a vaccination exemption" was left up to PEOPLES' DOCTORS.

      Speaking as someone who went through LESS SEVERE lockdowns in a city 1500km NNE of you, you are so high and tripping on anti-government hate, you've forgotten about actual real

    • The "lockdown" was long because, it was initiated to late.

      If you are really that stupid, I hope you are the first one killed in those riots.
      You are a menace to society.

    • "The main lesson from COVID is people have to be allowed to manage their own health."

      It's a communicable disease. That means my health affects your health. To manage your health in the face of a communicable disease you need me to not do things that spread that disease.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The problem is that people can't "manage their own health", they can't escape being subject to what other people decide to do as well.

      Masks are a good example. Unless you have proper medical grade FFP3 ones, which were hard to come by during the pandemic, a cloth mask only protects other people. You are reliant on others wearing them. The only other choice is to not go out, order all your shopping online, and hope your boss doesn't mind you flipping burgers from home.

      The best option is what Japan did. Every

      • Masks are a good example. Unless you have proper medical grade FFP3 ones, which were hard to come by during the pandemic, a cloth mask only protects other people. You are reliant on others wearing them. The only other choice is to not go out, order all your shopping online, and hope your boss doesn't mind you flipping burgers from home.

        With the benefit of hindsight masking had no observable impact on the spread of the virus.
        https://www.cochranelibrary.co... [cochranelibrary.com]

        Whatever protective effect masking has is a bit like swimming down to the bottom of a pool reactor in a lead lined bathing suit. Yes it is protective, no it ultimately doesn't matter.

        • The rest of the world disagrees.
          Masking is extremely effective, even if it is self made cotton mask.

          • The rest of the world disagrees.
            Masking is extremely effective, even if it is self made cotton mask.

            Please cite your evidence to support masking having had an impact on viral spread.

            Cochrane conducted a comprehensive systematic analysis of the available data and was unable to find evidence of an impact of masks on viral spread. It easily found signals for other NPIs but not masking.

            • Please cite your evidence to support masking having had an impact on viral spread.

              There where experiments where two towns close to each other, one had mask mandate the other not. The difference was noticeable.

              Some German institutes did experiments, with SNEEZING rubber dolls. They found aerosol spread decreased heavily with a mask. Obviously a no brainer.

              If you want me to google the year old studies, because you are to lazy, you have to pay my hours.

    • We can discuss about how well calibrated responses of different governments were, and Iâ(TM)d be first to argue that say schools were often closed for too long given the low risk to children.

      Though, knowing the all the âoefreedom fightersâ, the same bunch would be blaming government for all the dead resulting from resisting lockdowns.

  • We all go to the public chamber and spittle amongst each other for a few hours. It's a great plan to see in action if you're a fan of evolutionary process. And I am.

  • The first problem is meat agriculture. The second problem (of bacterial pathogens) is routine overuse of antibiotics inappropriately in clinical settings and meat agriculture. These aren't solvable by UN pontification.

The first version always gets thrown away.

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