On 17 November 2019, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in China. The media began talking about “a strange pneumonia”, which was gradually infecting the inhabitants of Hubei. Nobody could have imagined what was about to happen in the months to come.

The virus moves rapidly, too rapidly. Chinese leader Xi Jinping declares war on the coronavirus “demon,” however China’s efforts – too late and insufficient – are unsuccessful in stopping contagion. In just a few months the coronavirus hits Germany, Italy, India and the United States. Whereas in the 14th century it took the plague 16 years to reach Europe, COVID-19 travelled the same route in just a few months. Times have changed and trade between countries, even very distant countries, is increasingly frequent, and especially fast.

And so the virus was free to spread.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the pandemic: “In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths and the number of affected countries climb even higher,“ announced General Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that “The WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic. Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly.”

And so COVID-19 became a global issue. To this day, this is what we know about the virus. This and little else. We can trace its origins and its circulation, however we do not know how long it will be before we get rid of it.

Yet History can be of help to us. An article which appeared on May 10 identified two fundamental moments which determine the end of a pandemic “The medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.”

What point are we at now? It is hard to say for certain. Last summer it looked like the virus had decreased in force and appeared less dangerous. From mid-May to the end of September, infections were in the order of a few hundred / thousand per day, intensive care units were stable and deaths at a minimum.

During the past weeks however, following the European trend, the number of people infected in Italy has soared to over 11,000 (of which 95% without symptoms as declared by virologist Giorgio Palù), intensive therapy units are slowly filling up again and the number of deaths appears stable. The current situation cannot be compared to that of last winter, as Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also explained: “It is not March, we have to make adequate and well-thought choices”.

To this day, the government’s objective has been to contain the virus in such a way that it impacts health institutions like a constant small wave and not like a tsunami with a devastating effect. Because maybe the best thing to do is learn to live with the virus, mitigating it as much as possible and reducing to a minimum its impact on hospitals.

The second and maybe more brutal manner of declaring the end of a pandemic is when the population, tired of the epidemic, decides to simply live with the virus. According to Allan Brandt, a Harvard historian quoted by the New York Times, this could be the case with COVID-19: “As we have seen in the debate about opening the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by socio-political processes.”

The first thing which needs to be done to accelerate the end of the coronavirus pandemic is to chronicle what is happening in a clear manner and without giving in to useless alarmism. We are undoubtedly dealing with a complex virus, however, COVID-19 is not the bubonic plague.

Moreover, the latter which on many occasions decimated populations throughout the world, teaches us something extremely important: diseases come and go. Sometimes in mysterious ways. The “black death” has not even entirely disappeared, it has only momentarily retreated: “In the United States – reports the New York Times, “infections are endemic among prairie dogs in the Southwest and can be transmitted to people.”

Recently, cases have also been reported in China. “The plague” – points out Giuseppe Pigoli in I dardi di Apollo (Utet) (“Apollo’s Darts” ed.n) – “was never completely eradicated. In the year 2000 a WHO report listed over 34,000 cases in 24 nations over a 15-year span. The 1990s especially witnessed a resurgence of the infection, to the point that it has once again been included in the category of re-emerging illnesses.”

The Spanish Flu

Many have compared COVID-19 to the Spanish flu which, between 1918 and 1920, infected over 500 million people, killing (according to some estimates) 50 million. One hundred years later, we still do not yet know where the virus originated. There are diverse hypotheses: some believe it initially broke out in Haskell County in Kansas and was brought to Europe by American soldiers, while according to others it was widely spread by 96,000 infected Chinese workers sent to the Western front during the First World War to help English and French troops.

As Pigoli points out in the above-mentioned volume, “the illness initially appeared as a “banal” influenza: temperature, aching joints and weakness. However in just a few days the clinical picture underwent a dramatic change: the temperature rose drastically, mucus and blood appeared in the lungs causing patients to “drown” and bringing people, who until only a few days earlier had appeared healthy, to a rapid death”. This description reminds us a lot of COVID-19.

Contrary to what one might think however, it was not the more fragile and elderly people who were most affected, as is usually the case with coronavirus, but men who were generally healthy. Tired, dirty, and worn out by the mud in the trenches, the soldiers became the virus’ main target with hundreds of thousands wiped out.

In May 1918, death rates peaked to 70%. It was the start of the massacre: upon returning home, the veterans brought the disease with them, infecting relatives: “Accounts describe how funerals were celebrated continually. People wore protective masks, entire families fell ill and were confined to their homes with law enforcement watching their doors”.

Two years later, the Spanish flu suddenly disappeared. Pigoli points out that “viruses survive by camouflaging themselves to escape from antibodies. The history of these mutations is full of episodes which clearly show how this infectious agent is almost invincible and how, despite every year health authorities prepare new vaccines, occasionally virulent epidemics which are very difficult to control occur, such as those which broke out in 1957, 1968 and 1977”.

Viruses, moreover, come and go. And as Andrew Nikiforuk wrote in the Fourth Horseman, they are “a mutating reminder of how life is”.

Translation by Audrey Sadleir

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Numerous First World countries such as the US, UK, Israel, Japan, Australia, and the EU have reportedly purchased 51 percent of COVID-19 vaccine candidates — which account for 2.7 billion doses — as researchers are busy testing the efficacy of vaccine candidates.

What About Vaccines for Developing Nations?

The news was contained in a recent report from the non-profit organization Oxfam and was revealed after analyzing data gathered by the analytical firm Airfinity.

While the remaining 2.6 billion doses have been promised to developing nations such as Indonesia, Mexico, Bangladesh, China, Brazil, and India.

As many countries are hunting for the COVID-19 vaccines, it is feared that developing nations cannot afford to buy vaccines to fulfill their needs.

“Access to a life-saving vaccine shouldn’t depend on where you live or how much money you have. The development and approval of a safe and effective vaccine is crucial but equally important is making sure the vaccines are available and affordable to everyone. COVID-19 anywhere is COVID-19 everywhere,” said Robert Silverman of Oxfam America.

What Vaccines?

Indonesian epidemiologist Dr. Pandu Riono shows no interest in the news, arguing that there have been no vaccines yet as researchers are still busy testing them.

“Why should we panic? Which vaccines? No vaccines are available yet as pharmaceutical companies are still busy producing and testing it,” Riono told InsideOver.

WHO Launches Initiative to Ensure Equal Access to Future Vaccines

Riono added that developing nations can join a multilateral platform through the COVAX Facility—an Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—to boost development for vaccines, treatments, and therapies aimed at fighting the pandemic.

The WHO set up the COVAX initiative earlier this year to ensure member countries’ equal Access to the COVID-19 vaccine. Each country will get vaccines for 20 percent of its population.

“COVID-19 is an unprecedented global health challenge that can only be met with unprecedented cooperation between governments, researchers, manufacturers, and multilateral partners. By pooling resources and acting in solidarity through the ACT Accelerator and the COVAX Facility, we can ensure that once a vaccine is available for COVID-19, it’s available equitably to all countries,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO. 

As many as 172 countries have joined the COVAX vaccine mechanism, as the UN announced on its website. The WHO boss told journalists that around 2 billion doses of COVAX vaccine will be produced at the end of next year.

The initiative is expected that all developing nations can get vaccines for new coronavirus in a more affordable price.

The Stages of Vaccine Clinical Trials

It takes a process before a vaccine can be widely used. Riono explained that clinical trials have four stages.

“The first trial is on animals, then to humans to see how they respond and how their antibodies are formed. The second phase is to find out the right doses. Then, the third clinical trial is to vaccinate more people to see how effective the vaccine is. After that, when a vaccine is ready to be released, we will monitor the vaccine’s efficacy as well as its safety,” Riono explained.

When asked about how long each stage goes on, Riono explained that it varies widely. 

“It depends on several factors, right? Like the third clinical trial may take more than three months as we must make sure that the efficacy is high,” he added.

The number of volunteers involved in the trial also matters. If a trial involves only 1,000 people, it will not be effective.

“At least 30,000. The more, the better. In a vast archipelagic country like Indonesia, the trial can be spread in several big cities like Bandung, Jakarta, Surabaya to see the efficacy of the vaccine,” Riono added.

Will the Vaccines Actually Work?

However, there is no guarantee that vaccination can kill the mutated virus. This new strain of coronavirus triggers various reactions, from fevers to asymptomatic reactions.

The Director of Indonesia’s Eijkman Institute of Molecular Biology Prof Amin Subandrio stated that the mutated virus is useful for researchers to develop vaccines.

The latest research from a Florida-based Scripps Research Institute showed that coronavirus’s mutated variant is more contagious than its predecessor. Such a study triggers speculation that vaccination will not be sufficient.

“Well, it could be. Vaccines can be either produced from the deadly virus or weakened virus. The vaccine can be effective in killing one type of virus; however, it may not be effective for the virus’s mutated version. Therefore, further research is needed,” Riono said

Discipline is Still Needed

As vaccines will not be ready soon, some agree that the key to ending the pandemic is implementing a strict health protocol.

Wearing masks, keeping a distance, and washing hands are essential to protect ourselves and other people during the pandemic.

“Do not expect and think that the vaccine is everything,” Riono cautioned. “Let’s discipline ourselves by wearing a mask.”

Implementing health protocols will be our new lifestyle for at least the next five years. Vaccination cannot guarantee that we can skip wearing a face mask and hand-washing.

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The most acute phase of the pandemic appears to be ending. Countries — or, at the very least, provinces, states and regions— are coming out of lockdown. Many nations are reporting fewer new infections, and economies around the world are slowly being revived.

The WHO’s Problems are Far From Over

But, for the World Health Organisation, there are further troubles on the horizon. The organisation will doubtlessly be a major subject of the oncoming investigation into the global handling of the pandemic, which, at the time of writing, has the backing of 122 countries, and includes the European Union, African Group, the UK, Russia, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The WHO will likely need to answer whether it acted quickly enough, and whether it was too soft on China in the early stages of the outbreak.

The proposal for the investigation is said to be a watered down version of its initial draft. This is likely due to a fear of how China will react: indeed, the proposal did not even mention the country where the pandemic started, and whose authoritarian suppression media and whistleblowers in the country likely made it more difficult for the rest of the world to respond. China had already threatened Australia — which has led the initiative — with serious sanctions.

The WHO, of course, can’t strong-arm the investigation the way that China has done (and will likely attempt to do again). And there is a long list of things it, and especially its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, will need to answer for: most notably, its mishandling of the situation when the virus first appeared.

Questions Surrounding the WHO’s Reaction to COVID-19

Take, for example, something the WHO tweeted out in mid-January. It said: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” The same statement was roughly reproduced by the Chinese health services in Wuhan. We now know that there was better information available at the time, and that the Chinese government in particular was aware that such transmission was possible, if not certain.

As a result of taking China’s word at face value, the WHO dragged their feet in declaring it a global health emergency, which affected the global response. And now there are those – the US senior security advisor, John Bolton, among them — who are alleging a cover-up between the WHO and China

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

There is no hard evidence to support these theories of China-WHO foul play. Still, there are many who are concerned that Adhanom was too sympathetic with China and that this muddied his — and the organisation’s — communications.

The issue around faulty communication has since not been resolved. Take for example last weekend, the WHO tweeted out that: “There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from #COVID19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.” They were responding to the discussion around “immunity passports” — the idea that governments could grant special documents to citizens who test positive for COVID-19 antibodies, allowing them to move about freely. The WHO warned this was premature, since “no study has evaluated whether the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to subsequent infection by this virus in humans.”

This misses vital context. There is currently no evidence of immunity, but scientists have good reason to expect people who have recovered from COVID-19 to have some immunity to the virus, as that is the case with many other viruses.

The sloppy phrasing had an enormous impact. Major news organisations like Bloomberg News, for example, reported the story the headlines ‘WHO Warns You May Catch Coronavirus More Than Once”: a total misrepresentation the facts.

Partly revealing of the difficulties scientists have when communicating with a laymen audience, it was nevertheless a serious oversight, and fosters an atmosphere of misinformation which affects how people think, feel and act during the pandemic.

The WHO’s many missteps during the pandemic have led to widespread calls for scrutiny. There are those already predicting it will need tremendous reform after the pandemic and the WHO’s relationship with China will likely be of central concern going forward.

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US and foreign officials have said that President Donald Trump and his top aides are working behind the scenes to sideline the World Health Organisation (WHO), following the 60-day hold on US funding to the WHO implemented last week.

Trump accused the WHO of failing to accurately communicate the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in China, a decision which, according to Trump, led to the most severe outbreak of the virus on US soil. The White House blamed the WHO for a “lack of transparency and chronic mismanagement of the pandemic,” including in its list of complaints the WHO recommendation to keep US borders open following the outbreak in Wuhan.

White House attacks against the WHO have spotlighted institutional problems within the United Nations organisation as a whole.

The Trump-WHO War

Created on April 7, 1948 during a post-war fervor for global consciousness and global health, WHO states that its goal is “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.”

A subsidiary of the United Nations, its self-identified goal is to “detect and respond to acute health emergencies” and protect people from said emergencies by “identifying, mitigating and managing risks”. Its values demand fairness and impartiality towards every nation and global citizen.

WHO Praise for China

A WHO statement released on January 30 of this year praised the “leadership and the political commitment of the very highest levels of Chinese government, their commitment to transparency, and the efforts made to investigate and contain the current outbreak”. Yet accusations of dishonesty to the WHO, and to the global community, have followed China since it revealed the virus outbreak in late December, 2019.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO, was accused of showing partiality to China, and taking China’s word as fact, without carrying out investigations of his own. In early February, a week after labelling the outbreak in China a PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern), Ghebreyesus argued against global travel restrictions.

Travel restrictions against China “can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit,” he said.

“Where such measures have been implemented, we urge that they are short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and are reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves,” he continued.

Although some experts have argued that Ghebreyesus followed correct procedure, Trump capitalized on the Director-General’s advice not to close borders. On April 19, the Washington Post revealed that, despite Trump’s assertions that he was misled by the WHO, there were more than a dozen American government officials, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, working in the Geneva headquarters of the WHO, who communicated real-time information of the outbreak in China to Trump.

Furthermore, Trump himself has refused to openly criticize Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with whom he has a personal relationship. In late January, he tweeted: “It will all work out well. On behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi.” The United States’ President had also recently thanked China for “their efforts and transparency” in dealing with the pandemic.

‘Get That Vaccine’

Trump’s criticisms against the WHO are hypocritical and self-serving, but they illuminate deep political and financial discrepancies within the international body.

In an interview with CNN last week global business magnate and Microsoft founder Bill Gates was adamant that “China did a lot of things right at the beginning.”

“Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and see where they missed some things,” he continued, while adding that “some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place and they avoided the incredible economic pain, and its sad that even the US, that you would have expected to do this well, did it particularly poorly.”

The multibillionaire concluded by asking nations to “to take the great science we have, the fact that we’re in this together, fix testing and treatments and get that vaccine.”

After the United States, Bill Gates is the WHO’s biggest funder. Through three organisations created or funded by Gates: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS and the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, the WHO received more than $474 million in 2017, in contrast to the $401 million provided by the US in the same year.

But Gates is not the only big-source funder of the WHO. Other vaccine-creators and Big Pharma groups funded the WHO this year, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novovax and Nosocomial Vaccine Company.

The precedent was set during the aftermath of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic when an investigation into the WHO revealed that many scientific experts who had advised the then-WHO Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan to prematurely declare the H1N1 outbreak a pandemic were funded by Big Pharma and major vaccine-makers. Chan’s decision would lead to billions of premature governmental spending on vaccines that were not needed, because of minimal global infections.

All PHEIC-ed Up

While health officials and scientists continue to debate whether an earlier declaration of a global pandemic would have made a difference to the management of the outbreak, they are adamant that the WHO’s guidelines on declaring a pandemic be overhauled. After the H1N1 pandemic fiasco, the WHO revamped its guidelines, using instead a PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern) method.

The WHO would not label the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic until March 11, causing confusion among government and health officials worldwide. In response to using the PHEIC label, WHO spokeperson, Tarik Jasaveric said on January 30: “There is no official category (for a pandemic).

“WHO does not use the old system of 6 phases — that ranged from phase 1 (no reports of animal influenza causing human infections) to phase 6 (a pandemic) — that some people may be familiar with from H1N1 in 2009.”

After an emergency committee meeting on January 22, 8 days before the PHEIC declatation, another WHO spokesperson had said: “at the time of the first meeting not all members of the committee felt that there was adequate evidence/information to support recommending declaration of a PHEIC”.

Is Criticism of the WHO Legitimate?

The WHO’s inability to make a definitive declaration on the coronavirus was widely criticized by scientists and health officials. Health officials accused the WHO of misleading them, and misleading the public. Others questioned the political motivations behind the WHO’s lack of transparency.

David Heyman, who worked for the WHO for 22 years told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in February that the form and nature of the PHEIC needs to be reconsidered.

“There’s confusion around the world about the declaration. “What does it really mean and why does it always appear to be delayed rather than on time?”

A recent internal audit also portrayed the organization in a negative light. The audit stated that the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, the division responsible for the global coronavirus outbreak, is chronically underfunded. The program, the audit recounts, has repeatedly posed “severe” and unacceptable” hazard levels to the organisation as a whole.

As of May, 2019, 59 out of 90 recommendations given by internal auditors were uncompleted, including 38 “high-significance” reforms, some of which were accused of suffering “low implementation efforts”.

Even worse, the audit warned of a rise in allegations of internal corruption, detecting multiple schemes aimed at defrauding the organisation of large sums of money.

Can We Still Trust the WHO?

The biggest problem the World Health Organisation faces are corruption and lack of transparency. Dr. Kamradt-Scott, in a recent British Medical Journal article, called for greater transparency in how the WHO decides to what constitutes a public health emergency.

“Until there is increased transparency around [emergency committee] deliberations, questions about irrelevant considerations, undue influence and political interference will continue to arise,” he wrote.

“The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition,” the WHO’s Constitution reads. Yet, political and financial motivations have left the World Health Organisation unwilling to follow its own constitution. As such, we the people, can no longer trust that the WHO has our best interests in mind.

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