Pandemic, year 2: the consequences of the coronavirus are still and always more obvious than its origin located in China, probably in November or December 2019. Difficulty in finding with certainty the source of the problem which now feeds calls to reform the system of WHO international health survey. First text in a series of two.
Almost two years after the onset of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus causing COVID-19, uncertainty still hangs over the starting point of its pandemic.
However, if the beginning of the health crisis that has confined the world is far from reaching a consensus, the criticisms targeting the World Health Organization (WHO) converge a little more to denounce the part of the responsibility of the agency. UN health in the nebula that still lingered over the source of the problem.
These voices are calling for a reform of the organization’s investigative capacity, in order to avoid the repetition of the same scenario during another and inevitable emergence of local infections with global consequences.
“The pandemic has dealt a heavy blow to the WHO, which has seen its credibility tarnished due to its slow reactions, but also the limited nature of its investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, sums up at the other end of the video conference,” virologist Benoit Barbeau, who teaches biology at UQAM. It is clear that a reflection will have to begin on the role of the Organization in the investigation of a pandemic, but also to ensure that its investigations will have more teeth in the future. “
For the virologist Jean-Paul Gonzalez, who has participated in international surveys on the Ebola virus and on dengue hemorrhagic fever, the inventory still complicated to make on the origins of the pandemic should justify that we grant the future more power to the WHO to investigate. “It’s a vital organization that needs to be strengthened, rather than replacing it,” says the scientist in Washington, where he teaches at Georgetown University. When an epidemic occurs, there should be a right of interference in the country from which it originates. Teams of scientists should be received without hindrance, be assisted in their process, without there being the possibility of hiding things from them. “
A power to be strengthened
The idea seems to be gaining ground within the UN, where the Independent Group of Experts on Pandemic Preparedness and Response last week called for the adoption of a new international treaty to precisely strengthen “The authority and independence of the WHO” and especially its investigative powers in the event of a pandemic.
The panel speaks of “new legal instruments” to “fill the major gaps exposed [dans les deux dernières années] in preparing for and responding to a global pandemic, ”said Helen Clark, former New Zealand prime minister and Group co-chair, in a statement.
In the aftermath, on Monday, the ministers of health of the 194 member states of the WHO took part in a special three-day assembly to consider the negotiation of these “new legal instruments”.
“This will all happen again, unless you, the nations of the world, come together and say with one voice, ‘Never again!’ ”Summed up WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the opening of this meeting.
When an epidemic occurs, there should be a right of interference in the country from which it originates
This global public health treaty, if adopted, would be the second after the 2003 tobacco control accord.
“Is the world going to have been afraid enough of what is going on, of what happened, to learn from it and have a different monitoring program?” interview request at To have to Christian Bréchot, President of the Global Virus Network, former CEO of the Institut Pasteur and specialist in infectious diseases at the University of South Florida Like climate change, pandemics threaten the global health of the whole world. Without agreements between countries that are frontally opposed, as we have just seen on the environment between China and the United States, we will always be at risk in the face of a next pandemic, and the WHO will not have more to be able to. “
“When the world goes to war, there is above all a consensus that is established within the UN, remarks for his part Mr. Gonzalez, while the identification of a new variant, called Omicron, has put the planet on alert for several days in the face of a possible resurgence of the disease it could induce. To fight a pandemic, it should be the same, and the WHO must be able to build that consensus on the basis of solid information. “
However, the solidity of the investigation into the origins of the pandemic is still debated.
Persistent doubts
Last March, the report by WHO experts on the beginnings of the ongoing health crisis was greeted with skepticism by the international community because of the tight control exercised by Beijing over the investigating scientists sent to China. The document concluded that the most likely origin of the coronavirus was the bat. It would have spread to humans through an intermediate host. This other animal has still not been identified with certainty.
A year after the onset of SARS-CoV-2, the WHO also considered “extremely unlikely” the hypothesis of an accident or a laboratory leak, however maintained by the fact that the first cases of infection seem to have occurred. was discovered in the city of Wuhan, seat of a Chinese Institute of Virology and of a very high security laboratory – of the so-called P4 category – in which samples of coronavirus taken from bats were kept.
Note that scientists also evoke another possible first outbreak 300 km north of this city.
However, the idea of an accidental leak was revived by the many revelations about the experiments carried out on these viruses in this laboratory. We are talking about so-called gain-of-function manipulations aimed at manipulating pathogens in order to test their contagiousness between species. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Institute for Strategic, Political, Security and Economic Consultancy reported in April 2020, took part in these highly controversial experiments in the years leading up to the pandemic, with the collaboration of laboratories and US research funds.
But last August, despite international pressure, China rejected the idea of a new WHO investigation on its territory, saying the first was sufficient.
“China is largely responsible for the fact that it is still difficult today to understand how the virus appeared and how it spread,” sums up Christian Bréchot. There were too many secrets during the early stages of the pandemic. And there are still some today. “
According to him, the investigation into the origins of the pandemic crossed “political struggles which have affected the serenity of the investigations”. Struggles which, coupled with the atavistic “opacity” of the Chinese, mean that today, on the laboratory leak, among others, “we have no argument to confirm this hypothesis, nor arguments for it. ‘invalidate,’ says the scientist.
An uncertainty and doubts that fuel a system of beliefs, more than a system of facts, beliefs often exploited for political ends and to fuel opposition to pandemic control measures. Among others.