The risk analyst Nassim Taleb, who published the book The Black Swan in 2007 about unpredictable events, has concluded that the coronavirus pandemic was a white swan. It was a perfectly preventable disaster. Sars in 2003 and the swine flu in 2009 etc. were so much better handled.
COVID-19 started in Wuhan in China. If China’s government had been open, it would have warned the world & isolated & cured the disease. But China is an authoritarian state, preferring secrecy, delaying the cure, and it did not call for international cooperation.
The world has a universal organization for health care, the World Health Organization (WHO), founded in 1948 with 192 members. It is supposed to set the standard for health care and be a global clearing house for medical information.
The WHO was once a strong international organization, notably under Director General Halfdan Mahler, 1973-88. Most his successors have been forgettable with the outstanding exception of Gro Harlem Brundtland, 1998-2003. It has fallen victim to politicization & negative selection.
The US has been a major culprit. For decades, since Reagan, it has tried to minimize the cost of the WHO as all other United Nations organizations, and it has been quite successful. The WHO has a tiny annual budget of $2.4 billion in 2020, one-quarter of the CDC budget.
Even so, the Chinese authorities did inform the WHO early on, as the organization states: “A pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan, China was first reported to the WHO Country Office in China on 31 December 2019.” BBC reported it at length on January 3, 2020.
With the WHO out of play, no international cooperation materialized. A G20 leaders’ virtual meeting on March 26 resulted in no concrete action. The US set the hostile tone unilateral action by barring its territory to foreign nationals who had visited China on January 30.
The rest you know. The COVID-19 tragedy illustrates the costs of parochialism in a globalized world. If we want to avoid the repetition of such white swan events, we need to turn around and focus on international cooperation again.
The current global failure of national handling of the pandemic should lead to a rethinking of not only the WHO but of the role of intergovernmental organizations in general. The old truth holds true. If the United States doesn’t lead, nobody else will.
