- The world has a post-Sars plan under the World Health Organisation to fight any pandemic, but sadly many countries just ignore it
Humanity may be under a global viral threat, but it has been every country for itself. And two of the world's greatest powers are at loggerheads. Some very powerful people in Beijing and Washington are treating the pandemic as just another chess piece in their grand geopolitical game for world dominance.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak of 2002/04, some of the smartest people in epidemiology, vaccine development, public health and international politics, got together to address flaws that were exposed in the responses of individual governments and transnational bodies to the crisis.
The result was the revamped International Health Regulations, a global framework for signatory countries and territories to respond to viral outbreaks under the auspices of the World Health Organisation of the United Nations.
Under this framework, the WHO was supposed to centralise and coordinate a global response with member states. Countries would notify it about potential outbreaks and share information about an epidemic at the earliest stage.
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The WHO would coordinate containment efforts, declare emergencies, and help revise responses. As part of international law, it's binding on almost 200 countries that signed it, including China and the United States.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic. We are in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis and few people have heard about this WHO regulatory framework. Many if not most of the signatory countries either ignore it, or follow it selectively and haphazardly. The Trump White House is acting as if the WHO doesn't exist.
The WHO advice against international travel bans has been ignored by more than 70 member states. China initially advocated it, when its own citizens were being banned from entering many countries. Now, it has imposed its own restrictions.
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Even so, as the country where the pandemic first emerged, China has been following the revised WHO regulations, notwithstanding its latest travel bans against foreigners.
This has led to close coordination and cooperation, which arguably helped the country contain the virus. But in a world turned upside down, some Western countries " especially the US " which are flouting the WHO regulations and therefore international law have been accusing the WHO of kowtowing to China. Many -anti-China people in Hong Kong have been repeating the same accusation.
Those same countries should have asked: would they have been in better shape now if they had heeded the WHO warnings and advice back in January?
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