Dr David Nabarro:

We just have a complete fracture in global leadership right now. To the point where a UN Security Council resolution on Covid was not approved because the World Health Organisation was mentioned in the resolution. The people of the world actually should be going completely crazy with anger. There should be a petition of 500 million people to the world leaders saying, “What on earth are you doing? What on earth are you playing at?”

We have the biggest crisis of all time in many of our livelihoods and you’re squabbling. You’re squabbling over whether the World Health Organisation should be killed or kept alive, when the world needs the WHO more than ever. Because it’s the only organisation that pulls the stuff together; it’s the only organisation that’s supporting countries with PPE; together with the World Food Programme and Unicef, it’s running the only airline that’s bringing supplies into Africa, bringing tests in. We’re dealing with the market failures.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you doing?” And this should be an absolute clamour from every single human being. Because businesses want this leadership, civil society wants this leadership, science wants this leadership, and, of course, the poor countries who are being terribly affected by this want this leadership.

But, because of certain processes that I won’t mention, the leadership is being broken, kicked in the teeth. Staff are being made to feel completely useless when, actually, they worked precisely within the rules that the same member states created in something called the International Health Regulations 2005, which says you cannot go and inspect a country and demand it to tell you what it has been doing. You have to rely on the country to produce its own information. The world should be in revolt about the fact that the leadership by the multilateral system is being damaged by a small number of nations for domestic reasons. [Continue reading…]