Reform and biosecurity proposals for after the pandemic
Comments I posted earlier to Facebook about the WHO, which explains why it would be great to see their functions replaced with a new structure, especially for pandemic protection:
"A lot of people seem to have been disappointed with the WHO's failures on the COVID pandemic. But why did anyone expect them to do a good job in the first place? The last big pandemic, AIDS, was discovered in 1981; it appears to have taken them two years to arrange a meeting to discuss it, and then another three years to actually do anything about it, by which point it was of course way too late. AIDS has now killed around 33 million people. Maybe having an organization like the WHO be responsible for novel pandemics was a terrible idea to begin with?
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/29/science/aids-now-seen-as-a-worldwide-health-problem.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/21/world/global-program-aims-to-combat-aids-disaster.html
Since the WHO seems to be doing a bad job, I decided to look up who was responsible for supervising their head, the Director-General. The answer seems to be... there isn't anybody. The Director-General is, essentially, appointed by a vote of all the countries of the world (the "World Health Assembly"), one vote per country, for a five-year term. Unless I'm missing something here, there is literally no procedure that allows anyone to remove them for any reason. I guess one could be added by re-writing the organizational constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote of the world's countries. Good luck with that.
https://apps.who.int/gb/gov/en/information_rule_wha_en.html"
And a great follow-up comment by Sam Gensburg:
"I actually think the better concern is that of the voting structure of the WHO and similar international bodies. This includes organizations like the UN General Assembly and, say, FIFA. Because they skew in power so heavily towards smaller nations, they tend to represent smaller nations, which on average are much poorer than larger nations. The average nation by these definitions is, roughly, Austria for population (9 million) and Jamaica for wealth ($5500 in GDP per person per year).
As such, this leads to the WHO more or less yelling at wealthy nations that it's their moral responsibility to share vaccine doses, which is what Jamaica and Austria want, while nations like the US, UK, and China feel completely unrepresented by these groups and free to completely ignore them.
Similarly, this is why the World Cup was expanded to 48 teams. Most of the voters in their elections had no chance of qualifying at 32 teams, and are willing to vote for anyone that gives them a better chance for that glory (and money)."
CEPI, who made the proposal in the Bloomberg article, is funded by a combination of the Gates Foundation, a few other wealth-derived nonprofits and a few of the major democracies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_for_Epidemic_Preparedness_Innovations