On December 30, 2019, precisely two years ago, the first information on the patients of Wuhan, in central China, began to circulate on social networks. The Chinese authorities reacted by denying, repressing and letting several weeks pass that would have been crucial in stopping the spread of the virus.
Yet on December 31, Taiwan’s medical authorities sent an email to the World Health Organization in Geneva to report these unconfirmed elements. “We would appreciate if you have relevant information to share with us,” the Taipei message specified. The WHO never replied, because Taiwan is not part of the organization due to the Chinese blockade.
On January 1, 2020 the Twitter profile of the Chinese newspaper Global Times announced that eight people had been arrested in Wuhan for “spreading unfounded news” about an epidemic. We know how things went afterwards. Those people were valuable sources of information, and one of them, Dr. Li Wenliang, died of covid a few weeks later.
Official figures
What lesson can we draw from those events? The beginning of the catastrophic pandemic has left us two lessons: the first internal to China, the second on the international health surveillance system.
In the first few weeks, China denied everything, only to then draw a very positive balance of its handling of the pandemic. On December 29, 2021, the embassy of China in France has written on Twitter that the country, where 18 per cent of the world population lives, records just 0.05 per cent of deaths from covid. Of course these are the official figures.
At the same time, China has been closed for two years and is unable to impose its “zero covid” strategy, as evidenced by the isolation of 13 million inhabitants of the city of Xi’an due to just a few dozen cases of contagion.
But above all, Beijing continues to obstruct a real investigation to shed light on the origins of the pandemic, still unknown. Given the politicization of the debate it is possible that we will never know the truth, between the laboratory accident, animal transmission or other hypothesis. From a scientific point of view this is a disaster.
Need for reform
On the international level, the WHO did not fulfill its role as a vigilant institution in those first weeks, aligning itself with the Chinese version for political reasons. The UN agency then got back on track, and today it does a valuable job coordinating the fight against the pandemic.
However, these shortcomings highlight the need for a profound reform. Last month, at the initiative of the European Union, the WHO launched negotiations on a new international treaty. The text will aim to “predict, prevent, identify and evaluate” the pandemics of the future, better coordinating the response.
This is good news, provided that the states do their part. The problem is that both the United States and China loathe overly binding treaties, which are nevertheless indispensable when it comes to health care, as the events of two years ago show. The negotiation has just begun. It remains to be seen whether the powerful of the world will have learned the lesson of the current pandemic.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
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