The roles of the WHO include:

• Universal health coverage
• Coordinate responses to health emergency
• Promote health and wellbeing

It has played an influential leading role in health achievements, such as eradicating smallpox, vaccinating against polio, developing an Ebola vaccine. It successfully oversaw the outbreak of SARS, Ebola and other diseases. It currently focuses on diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other non-transmissible diseases such as cancer and heart diseases. Its functions are largely “normative” says Kelley Lee, research chair in global health governance at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Meaning, it is primarily an advisory body, “providing guidelines and technical advice, collecting data, statistics, and so on.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO found itself under intense scrutiny by some member states, especially by the Trump administration; for failing to do its job in containing the novel coronavirus and acting as a “lapdog” for the Chinese.

Role of the WHO in the COVID-19 pandemic

As the novel coronavirus made its way to every side of the globe, the WHO was responsible in notifying the world of the emergence of an infectious disease with pandemic potential and coordinating a global response by providing technical and guidance support to member states in order to contain the virus. Moreover, it coordinates in the development of a vaccine, in order to better contain the spread of the virus.

Who’s at fault? How is the WHO being criticized?

The WHO was criticized harshly for being too slow to warn the world of the virus, declaring it a pandemic on March 11, 2020; several months after it was warned by Taiwan of the emergence of a disease in Wuhan; the alert went largely ignored by the WHO. Another criticism of the WHO was that it was too generous of its praise for China; despite a near unanimous assumption that China is covering up the true extent of the virus and did not cooperate in the initial stages when it was most crucial. Lawrence Gostin, an American professor who has spent 30 years with the World Health Organization, laments WHO’s incapability to act swiftly, in part because the organization cannot enter without an invitation by the country, which in this case China was blocking; holding China at fault. Lawrence, however, admits that the WHO should have stood up at least.

The Taiwan debacle

A growing number of leaders have been scrutinizing the WHO’s dealing of the pandemic. One thorn has been the email Taiwan sent on December 31, warning the WHO of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. This topic became divisive as critics, including US president Donald Trump, accuse the WHO of ignoring Taiwan’s warning, a claim which the Director-General of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus denies. This has sparked a blame game between the organization and members states over who is at fault for letting the disease spiral out of control. The WHO has defended itself, saying Taiwan did not mention the human to human transmission aspect of the virus and that it was not the first country to send a warning, opposing the claim that it ignored Taiwan’s warning. It is worth mentioning that Taiwan is not a member of the UN, thus is omitted from the WHO; the result of vehement Chinese opposition to its membership.

How Powerful is the WHO? Not much

The WHO does not hold an independent authority and it depends on the cooperation of its member states. “WHO doesn’t have any resources to be the action on the ground” says Kelley Lee. People have placed a false expectation that “‘WHO should do this, WHO should do that.’ Well, WHO is the member states. So if you want WHO to do something, then the member-states have to get together and say, ‘Do this.’”

Professor Lawrence Gostin calls for empowering the organization, providing it a political backing. “I can tell you episode after episode after episode, where countries around the world literally just ignored WHO, ignored scientific evidence, whether from Ebola to SARS to H1N1 to Zika and now with the coronavirus.” he says. Furthermore, he scolds the international community for underfunding the organization, working on a budget similarly sized to a single large US hospital. “The world has the WHO that it deserves because it gives it very little funding the size of one US hospital, it gives it no political backing” demonstrating the entanglement of the WHO in geopolitical power play by major countries, widely undermining the efforts of the organization. ‘The world had enough time to intervene’ Director-General of the WHO Tedros defended the organization.

Who is to blame for letting the novel coronavirus spiral out of control?

Source 1 – 2 – 3 – 4

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Is it possible to predict future pandemic?

Large initiatives underway

75% of newly emerged diseases that affect humans are of Zoonotic origin, transmitting between animals and humans. In order to better prepare ourselves and possibly predict the outbreak of viruses with pandemic capability, large initiatives and projects were created for that purpose.

The Emerging Pandemic Threats program includes four projects: PREDICT, RESPOND, IDENTIFY, and PREVENT, was being funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), until Donald Trump cut off funds in 2019. Over the span of 8 years, the PREDICT project has discovered nearly 1000 viruses. The Global Virome Project, proposed in 2016; it plans on discovering nearly all the viruses that could infect humans; however, it is still a concept.

The Answer is… Nearly Impossible

According to Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, two virologists based on Sydney, efforts to predict or prevent pandemics will not succeed. Simply, the number of existing viruses is too many to accurately calculate the odds of predicting and preventing pandemics. Approximately 4400 viruses have been discovered, a meager number considering the millions of viruses yet to be identified. It is estimated that 500,000 undiscovered viruses have the capability to transmit to people.

“We’re only just coming to terms with the vastness of the virosphere.” Says Geoghegan.

There are millions of variables to take into account in each level of the viral contraction that could create an infectious disease, the environment, the animal host, and the virus itself.

According to Kristian Andersen, from the Scripps Research Institute, predicting pandemics “is simply impossible… What you’re trying to predict is likely something that happens maybe once out of tens of billions of encounters, with one virus out of millions of potential viruses. You will lose your fight against the numbers.”

There’s hope…

Despite the shortcomings, technological advancements have made is much easier for us to create a vaccine in record time. We shouldn’t be quick to dispel efforts in predicting pandemics; Jonna Mazer the global director for PREDICT argues that if we held the same complaints in weather forecasting 100 years ago “we wouldn’t have created the data that lets us forecast the weather, which we can do pretty well now.” Although it’s still impossible to predict the occurrence of pandemics, effort should be focused on detecting it early on. Kristian Andersen suggests detecting the first cluster of cases. Instead of actively trying to prevent pandemics from occurring, we need to develop a more effective and rapid framework in containing the spread of a disease. One company – Kinsa – is working on a smart fever detecting device capable of measuring fever fluctuations and collecting data, which is sent to the company for analyzing and mapping out the anomalies that would arise in contrast to the regular fever inducing infectious seasons. This will greatly help authorities detect hotspots and promptly take measures in detecting and containing a viral infection before it makes its way to a wider landscape.

Source 1 – 2 – 3

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A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a divisive measure that entails a guaranteed minimum income for each citizen by a government. It is also known as a citizen’s income, or simply basic income. A government would entitle each citizen to an income, minimum enough to cover the basic cost of living, whether they are employed or not.

The idea was proposed to address the jobs lost due to technological advancements and automation; however, in time of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent job losses in the millions, the strategy has been gaining steam as an alternate measure to the financial packages earmarked for mitigating the economic and social impact. Moreover, it is proposed as a better alternative to the welfare system and its many failures, such as the infamous “Poverty Trap”.

Funding

A social policy of this magnitude requires significant funding; different approaches have been proposed to cover the cost of UBI.

For one, scrapping and completely eliminating the welfare system already in place would free up $1 trillion to be directed towards funding UBI in the United States. Additionally, in a world where income and social inequality is on the rise and the gap between rich and poor continue to widen, the prospects of taxing the rich “1%” of society seems reasonable enough to redistribute the funds by providing basic income for everyone, and tackling inequality by narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and maintaining social cohesion.

Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and former finance minister of Greece, has proposed the idea of a “Universal Basic Dividend”, directing a percentage of all shares from all companies to a public equity trust and distributing the dividends equally for all members of society as producers of “social capital”.

How does it help the people?

• Social Safety Net: Income to lean back on in times of crisis or job loss
• More time to find better jobs: Allow people to dedicate more time to search for jobs they enjoy doing.
• Care for a relative in need: Take time off from work to care for a sick relative or babysit without losing income.
• Pursue education: Opportunity to pursue or continue further education.
• Less stress: Fear of being financially insecure mitigated.
• Increased Productivity: Lower stress and continued education increases productivity and valuable skills respectively.

How does it help the socio – economics?

Is it feasible?

The feasibility of applying a universal basic income is complex for a number of political, economic and financial reasons, depending on the variety of different countries that exist.

UBI would be more accepting in traditionally socialist countries, while opposition in capitalist or neoliberal nations would be more pronounced and difficult to apply due to lobbying by the “1%” who might be taxed.

Moreover, we have to take into account the financial and economic capabilities of different nations; countries with weak and low GDPs and a high debt burden would see it difficult to apply such a scheme.

Although small scale pilot program has been implemented regarding UBI; this scheme has yet to be applied on a wider scale. Meaning, despite the valuable data derived from the different pilot programs applied, it has never been fully tested on a whole nation; thus any discussion regarding the successful implementation of a program of this magnitude are largely theoretical.

Universal Basic Income is a highly complex and ambitious social program that has recently gained awareness as a potential solution to those affected by the job losses due to pandemic. However, it still remains a divisive program with many hurdles and unanswered questions. Nonetheless, it is an idea worth investing in.

Source 1 – 2 – 3

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