(OPINION) The World Health Organization was hoping that there would be a vote on the global pandemic treaty at the World Health Assembly at the end of this month, but now that is not going to happen.
Negotiations that were supposed to result in a final draft of the treaty have completely broken down, and that is great news because the treaty would have transferred a tremendous amount of authority to the World Health Organization.
But if dengue fever continues to rip across the globe like it has been, or if H5N1 mutates into a form that can spread easily from person to person, fear of what is coming next could potentially revive the negotiations.
On Friday, the WHO publicly admitted that negotiations had ended without producing a final draft of the treaty. The following comes from ABC News…
On Friday, Roland Driece, co-chair of WHO’s negotiating board for the agreement, acknowledged that countries were unable to come up with a draft. WHO had hoped a final draft treaty could be agreed on at its yearly meeting of health ministers starting Monday in Geneva.
“We are not where we hoped we would be when we started this process,” he said, adding that finalizing an international agreement on how to respond to a pandemic was critical “for the sake of humanity.”
Driece said the World Health Assembly next week would take up lessons from its work and plot the way forward, urging participants to make “the right decisions to take this process forward” to one day reach a pandemic agreement “because we need it.”
At one time, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had such high hopes for the treaty, and he still insists that “anything is possible”…
Addressing a sullen final day of negotiations, the WHO chief insisted, “This is not a failure.”
“We will try everything — believing that anything is possible — and make this happen because the world still needs a pandemic treaty,” he said.
Since the treaty is dead for now, this means that the WHO will not be running the show when the next global pandemic arrives.
And we should be very thankful for that.
But it is just a matter of time before there are renewed calls for a treaty, because we are already seeing some very chilling things happen all over the globe.
In areas that have tropical climates, dengue fever is spreading at an unprecedented rate.
This disease is also known as “bone crusher fever”, and there have already been millions of confirmed cases in 2024…
Australian travelers are being warned of a sharp increase in a potentially deadly virus, commonly known as the ‘bone crusher fever’ — with more than five million people now contracting the condition – and cases almost doubling in 2024 alone.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and 1Cover Travel Insurance, dengue fever — a potentially fatal acute infectious disease caused by a virus and transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito — has seen a rise likely due to increased post-Covid travel and the El Niño climate cycle. (READ MORE)
