"The world should be in revolt," Dr. David Nabarro

Dr. David Nabarro, a Special Envoy of the World Health Organisation on COVID-19, made an impassioned plea for better collaboration between global leaders.

We just have a complete fracture in global leadership right now. To the point where a UN Security Council resolution on COVID was not approved because the World Health Organisation was mentioned in the resolution. The people of the world actually should be going completely crazy with anger. There should be a petition of 500 million people to the world leaders saying, “What on earth are you doing? What on earth are you playing at?”

We have the biggest crisis of all time in many of our livelihoods and you’re squabbling. You’re squabbling over whether the World Health Organisation should be killed or kept alive when the world needs the WHO more than ever. Because it’s the only organisation that pulls the stuff together; it’s the only organisation that’s supporting countries with PPE; together with the World Food Programme and Unicef, it’s running the only airline that’s bringing supplies into Africa, bringing tests in. We’re dealing with market failures.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you doing?” And this should be an absolute clamour from every single human being. Because businesses want this leadership, civil society wants this leadership, science wants this leadership, and, of course, the poor countries who are being terribly affected by this want this leadership.

But, because of certain processes, the leadership is being broken, kicked in the teeth. Staff are being made to feel completely useless when, actually, they worked precisely within the rules that the same member states created in something called the International Health Regulations 2005, which says you cannot go and inspect a country and demand it to tell you what it has been doing. You have to rely on the country to produce its own information. The world should be in revolt about the fact that the leadership by the multilateral system is being damaged by a small number of nations for domestic reasons.

Now, Gayle [Smith, President, and CEO of the ONE Campaign]’s absolutely right, you can contain this virus. Lockdowns are not being recommended by the World Health Organisation or the UN. What we’re saying instead is get it organised so that you’ve got proper public health in your communities, so that you can detect people with the disease and help them to stay out of harm’s way, and then you can deal with outbreaks as they build up. But don’t muck around, do it quickly. There’s one country in the world that waited five weeks before it took this disease seriously and is now deciding that it’s not going to take it seriously anymore, that is now the world’s virus factory.

And we’ve really got to start paying attention to the fact that actually poorer countries don’t need to do deep lockdowns, they just need to organise their public health.

The WHO will support them to do it, the WHO needs some money, and the IMF needs to give poor countries the money so that they’re not going to go bankrupt. The maths are clear, the need is clear, and I’m afraid that, with the current load of global leaders at the moment, whilst about 185 want the United Nations and WHO to lead, certain others don’t, but it’s not for any other reason than domestic politics. People should be going absolutely crazy about this.

Original source: Tortoise
Published on 13 May 2020