WHO’s chief scientist urges greater collaboration against dangerous pathogens
The World Health Organization’s new chief scientist has urged countries to share work on vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for the 20 most dangerous pathogens to avoid the “deep scars” caused by inequitable access to countermeasures at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
As national health systems continue to reel from the pandemic, Jeremy Farrar said “there has got to be a mutual understanding” between countries to ensure better preparedness. “Don’t wait for a crisis to put in place better systems — by the time [of the next pandemic], you’ll only just be turning the key and that’s too late,” he added.
Farrar said experts must not “neglect the known pathogens for the sexy unknown ones”. The WHO has a research and development “roadmap” fully in place for Ebola, Marburg and the tick-borne Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, but more work needs to be done on Zika, Rift Valley Fever and “Pathogen X” — an infectious disease yet to emerge that has the potential to cause a pandemic.
Farrar also called on pharmaceutical manufacturing to be shifted from populous countries, which “inevitably look after their own citizens first”. He cited smaller countries such as Denmark, Rwanda, Senegal or Denmark, which could provide for their own citizens “within a week” and then export spare output “in a time of crisis”.
In his first interview with a newspaper since he started in the job three months ago, Farrar said the world faced a number of health challenges, namely ageing and more unwell populations and a shrinking pool of health workers; conditions caused by climate change and the loss of biodiversity; and health crises stemming from economic trends such as youth unemployment and inequality.
“If we don’t address those key drivers in the 21st century, we’re going to face more,” said Farrar, who for a decade helmed Britain’s Wellcome Trust, a leading global health institution.
Another huge risk, he said, was that health workforces were “on the edge of collapse”, citing the UK’s National Heath Service, whose operational weaknesses had “been papered over by the workforce being willing to go beyond what’s normal”.
Debates about health sector reform and funding were obscuring the fact that “when you ask a workforce to go above and beyond, it collapses”, he said. “And the global health workforce is close to that point.”
Farrar said he was still open to all hypotheses on Covid’s origins, including an accidental laboratory leak from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, or its transmission from animals being sold in the city’s wet markets. His interpretation of the evidence accumulated over three years suggested that it “is increasingly that actually the natural origin is much more likely”.
“But you can’t ignore the geography, you can’t ignore the centre,” he added, referring to the potential leak from labs in Wuhan.
Farrar is open to the idea of a WHO new mission to China to trace Covid’s origins, “if there was a willingness to share all information, and this could be done in a way that will actually shed light on it”. While the health body was criticised early in the pandemic for being too lenient on China, it has increasingly become more vocal in calling on Beijing to share all relevant coronavirus data.
“Every [piece of] information should be shared. And we should get to the bottom of it,” he said, referring to the origins of Covid. But he added: “I’m not sure we will.”
The WHO should be more of a public “conductor” of initiatives to improve global health rather than running them inside the organisation, Farrar said.
While coronavirus laid bare tensions over how governments handle global outbreaks of infectious disease, Farrar said the world was “converging in many ways”, citing the problems of drug resistance and non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and obesity. “The issues that affect one country are increasingly going to affect every country.”
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Donato Paolo Mancini
