As the World Health Organization (WHO) has officially declared the end of the covid pandemic global health emergency, the international body is looking for ways to stay relevant and funded.
The “experts” decided the best approach would be to warn that there could be an even “deadlier” pandemic.
In a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday, director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sounded an alarm that the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over.“The threat of another variant emerging that causes new surges of disease and death remains,” Tedros said. “And the threat of another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains.”However, the WHO recently declared that the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer a health emergency.“When the next pandemic comes knocking — and it will — we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively and equitably,” he added.“We cannot kick this can down the road,” Tedros said in an address to the WHO’s member states. “If we do not make the changes that must be made, then who will? And if we do not make them now, then when?”
The real reason for the drama is 194 WHO member states are working on a global pandemic accord, with negotiations set to continue over the next year. And, then, there is also the money.
Tedros noted the importance of a “commitment from this generation” to the pandemic treaty “because it is this generation that experienced how awful a small virus could be.”Earlier in the meeting, member countries approved a $6.83 billion budget for the next two years that included a 20% increase in mandatory fees. The new budget “tested national commitments to fixing a WHO funding model which was seen as too small and overly reliant on the vagaries of donors,” per Reuters.
As an added bonus, the next pandemic might even be the result…of the climate crisis.
One potential threat comes from the human encroachment on natural bat habitats. Experts warn that such encounters increase the risk of pathogen transmission from bats to humans, potentially sparking future pandemics.More than 1 billion people are at risk because of a “battle” between the global economic system and nature, Ryan McNeill, a deputy editor of data journalism at Reuters, told CBS News. He is one of the authors of a recent series exploring hot spots around the world. In West Africa, 1 in 5 people lives in a high-risk “jump zone,” which Reuters describes as areas with the greatest likelihood of viruses jumping from bats to humans. Parts of Southeast Asia are also areas of concern. In South America, deforestation has created more high-risk areas than anywhere else in the world, McNeill said.”Scientists’ fear about that region what we don’t know, and that the next pandemic could emerge there,” he said.
I assert that the “deadlier” pandemic comes about via climate only if the bat virus genetics are modified to make the pathogen spikier and stickier to human lung tissues within a climate-controlled research laboratory.
This global pandemic accord would place many restrictions and requirements on signatories at the cost of personal liberties, cash, and options to pursue more successful disease-control approaches. And, quite frankly, the international “experts” failed miserably to address the first novel coronavirus.
Why should we trust them to handle something worse?
The failures are numerous and documented.
Pandemic closures hurt schoolchildren.
A group of researchers from some of the country’s most prestigious institutions reviewed test scores and other data related to educational performance in K-8 across the US.Their conclusion: There has been a ‘devastating’ level of pandemic-era learning loss throughout the nation.
A study from Johns Hopkins University confirms that lockdowns failed spectacularly to stop the spread or resulting deaths.
Lockdowns had “little to no effect” on saving lives during the pandemic — and “should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy,” according to economists in a new meta-analysis of dozens of studies.A group led by the head of Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics analyzed studies from the first surge of the pandemic to investigate widely pushed claims that stringent restrictions would limit deaths.Instead, the meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns across the US and Europe had only “reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.”
And “experts” who blamed the failure to follow useless guidelines for the continuing infections are now looking to sweep everything under the rug.
This pandemic is waning, but there will be another one. I want to say that we will learn and we will be different, both at the bedside and out in the world. I want to say that we will give grace, that we know how assigning blame only tears us further apart, but then I look at history. I think about our perception of the unvaccinated. I think of the stigma that so many diseases bring with them, how little we want to acknowledge the role of luck and random chance. And I have to wonder: When the next pandemic comes, who will we blame?
So, I will take a hard pass on the pre-pandemic panic.
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