Covid-19: why the WHO is sounding the alert without states following its prescriptions?
WHO logo, in front of its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland (illustrative image).
Fabrice Coffrini AFP
Text by: Jérémie Lanche
3 min
A number of new cases that flirts with 200,000 per day.
More than 2,000 new hospitalizations per day, including 20% in critical care.
Indicators of the pandemic are reaching new records in France.
And the situation is more or less the same in Europe and the United States.
The WHO speaks of a "
tsunami
" of Covid cases and the risk of a "collapse" of health systems.
This is not the first time that the agency has sounded the alarm and that is the problem.
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From our correspondent in Geneva,
We can blame the
WHO
for certain things
in the management of the crisis.
But not to not have foreseen the current outbreak ... Because it's been weeks, even months that the agency warns against the ambient relaxation in the face of barrier gestures and the almost casual attitude of certain countries which thought that we were done with Covid-19.
Just before Christmas, the WHO was already suggesting that canceling the family reunion might be wiser than allowing the virus to spread a little more ... in the midst of the 5th wave of the Delta variant, and with the threat of Omicron.
Omicron, which the WHO was already saying in mid-December was spreading at unprecedented speed and could overwhelm health systems.
►Also read: Covid-19: WHO advocates caution at Christmas and wants to “end the pandemic” in 2022
Just before, it was the regional director of WHO Europe, Hans Kluge, who also went there with his warning.
Especially on children, who are today the main unvaccinated and therefore the population in whom the virus circulates the most.
What is happening today is therefore no surprise to epidemiologists.
Even with the part of the unknown represented by the Omicron variant, this 5th wave is not only one of the most important in terms of contamination.
It was also one of the most predictable.
WHO cannot practice "name and shame"
If the WHO was so right from the start, why haven't governments listened to it?
Perhaps already because the WHO is, like all the emanations of the UN, constrained by its members.
The agency is only the sum of the states that make it up.
From this point of view, it cannot do what is called in English “name and shame” as an NGO, that is to say speak out to denounce the policies of such and such a State.
The WHO is as much a scientific organization as ... a political one, condemned to warn about vaccine inequality and the monopolization of doses by rich countries without ever being able to blame such and such a state or such a pharmaceutical company.
We therefore find ourselves today with an agency which, for almost a year and the appearance of the first vaccines, has been organizing several press conferences per week to say that the pandemic will only end if all countries have enough doses to avoid the appearance of new variants.
This is exactly what happened.
And at the rate at which vaccines are reaching poor countries, it is not playing the Cassandra to say that Omicron will not be the last variant to come and prolong the pandemic.
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