It took the United Nations General Assembly nine months to
arrange a special session dedicated to discussing the Covid-19
pandemic. No one, not even the organizers, knew what to expect from
the two-day virtual summit that kicked off Thursday.
The prevailing mood so far has been one of head-scratching:
about why the event took so long to organize, and what point there
was in holding it now.
UNGA President Volkan Bozkir, who pressed for the summit, argued
that “the world is looking to the U.N. for leadership; this is a
test for multilateralism.” If that’s the case, multilateralism
is likely to fail that test — if it hasn’t already.
Bozkir outlined a coming decade where the world simply tries to
get back to where it was at the beginning of 2020, meaning the
U.N.’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are already effectively
out of reach, thanks to a crisis “unlike any other crisis in the
75-year history of the United Nations.”
Bozkir’s goal is big — to “shake up how things are done”
in the global Covid-19 response — but the means are meager. The
world’s actions in 2020 have so far failed to match lofty goals
about fairness and resilience.
A U.N.-backed accelerator for Covid-19 tests, treatments and
vaccines has
raised only $10 billion of the $38 billion it needs
across 2020 and 2021, yet summit organizers are not seeking funding
pledges or even circulating a draft declaration.
By assembling 141 speakers without a plan this week, Bozkir’s
“overdue and much needed moment of reckoning,” became a
discussion with no outcomes or accountability.
Leaders presented shopping lists of interconnected health,
economic and environmental problems, but few took responsibility
for solving immediate vaccine and therapeutic problems.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the only leader of a major
country to directly urge more funding for the the ACT Accelerator,
and in her one-minute statement said WHO “is an institution
[that] needs to be strengthened” because “it is patently clear
that this global and multi-faceted crisis can only be surmounted by
global action.” The remarks were a rebuke to President Donald
Trump’s approach of
“vaccine nationalism,” which he pushed at
November’s G-20 summit, and a criticism of the current
unenforceable system of international health regulations.
Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg said her country plans to
allocate an additional $220 million to the accelerator this year,
bringing its total contribution so far to just over $500
million.
If anything, the global health crisis has shone a light on just
how much multilateralism has unraveled after four years of global
retreat by the United States.
Top speakers at the U.N. forum on Covid-19 include Merkel,
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel
Macron, but many governments sent their B-list: Health and Human
Services Secretary Alex Azar is representing the U.S., while fewer
than half the leaders of U.N.’s members taped video speeches.
Vaccine scientists also have speaking slots: “Maybe these
brilliant scientists will announce something, I have no idea,”
said Brenden Varma, Bozkir’s spokesperson.
Even among the diplomatic delegations slated to attend,
there’s a striking lack of enthusiasm. Azerbaijan, which proposed
the summit on behalf of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement,
declined a request for comment. “We have other things going
on,” said the spokesperson of one EU country, adding “we
don’t expect any outcome and overall the event is about seven
months too late.”
“The reason we’re doing this session is because Bozkir
wanted it,” said the spokesperson of one U.N. Security Council
permanent member. Varma, Bozkir’s spokesperson, agreed the UNGA
president is the driving force behind the meeting, seeing it as a
launching pad for a yearlong campaign for equitable vaccine
distribution.
Creaking multilateralism
Some diplomats said the most important role for the event is to
remind the world of the dangers of Trump’s
“vaccine nationalism.”
“It’s about assuring the multilateral dimension of the
response is still in people’s minds,” said a United Kingdom
government spokesperson.
Varma said “the biggest reason to have this meeting is to use
the U.N.’s convening power” to get scientists — including
those from vaccine developers BioNTech and AstraZeneca — talking
with one another.
The implication is that despite the pandemic consuming most of
the U.N.’s money and attention through 2020, the organization
hasn’t achieved these connections already.
The international vaccine alliance GAVI, the World Health
Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations have had more success with their joint scheme known as
COVAX, which is aimed at ensuring all countries get access to
vaccines for their most at-risk people.
With 189 governments signed up, the COVAX facility is “the
most promising globally coordinated solution” for getting
vaccines to all people and reopening economies,” a GAVI
spokesperson said. GAVI is asking governments to contribute “at
least an additional $5 billion in 2021,” and that all drug makers
join the facility.
Pfizer and BioNTech, whose vaccine won approval Wednesday in the
U.K. , and Moderna, which is seeking regulatory approval in the
U.S. and Europe for its vaccine, are among the drugmakers yet to
sign a deal.
Lack of big ideas and coordination
With the exception of European Council President Charles Michel
— who pushed the idea of a
global pandemic treaty, modeled after the Framework Convention on
Tobacco Control — the leaders’ pre-recorded video
speeches mostly rehashed 2020 breakthroughs and regrets.
Michel said the world needs to get real about the increasing
number of pandemics and agree to a treaty within the framework of
the WHO. He wants to include rules on everything from surveillance
of animal-to-human virus transmission, to acceleration of treatment
and vaccine research, and as yet unspecified requirements that
would make health care systems and supply chains more resilient.
“Let us mobilize and pool our experiences so that we help make
the world and humanity more just and more resilient,” Michel
urged.
The idea, which he has also floated at the G-20, has raised
questions across diplomatic circles in New York, Geneva and even
inside other EU institutions. It doesn’t appear to be related to
the
ongoing WHO reform talks and also would preempt an
Independent Panel for
Pandemic Preparedness and Response, commissioned by WHO’s
World Health Assembly, which is scheduled to report in May
2021.
Another committee
chaired by Lothar Wieler, head of Germany’s infectious
disease institute, is looking into potential changes to today’s
relatively toothless International Health Regulations, which govern
how countries should respond to outbreaks.
Olof Skoog, the European Union’s ambassador to the U.N.,
defended the idea as part of the EU’s effort to “invest in the
global system.”
The political tides of the U.N. bureaucracy are already shifting
away from Covid-19. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres
delivered a major speech Wednesday, saying that the “central
objective of the United Nations for 2021 is to build a truly global
coalition for carbon neutrality.” Guterres is hoping to build on
China, Japan and South Korea joining the European Union in
committing to net zero emissions, along with the incoming Biden
administration, which has promised the same.
— David Herszenhorn contributed to this report.
