WHO Pandemic Treaty Does Not Make Epidemiological Sense

Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India
12 Apr 2022

Pandemics are driven by regional factors. These factors in turn are dictated by geography, climate, population density, demography such as age profile, health status such as obesity levels, state of health services, urbanization and migration, to name a few. For instance in spite of similar guidelines followed by majority of countries of the world, the impact of Covid-19 differed vastly in continents. America and Europe had a much greater impact than Asia and Africa. These differences persisted in spite of vaccine roll out which hardly had any impact on the trends or these differences. [Subramanian,S.V.,Kumar,A.:Increases incovid-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the united states. European Journal of Epidemiology (2021)].

Similarly, countries which did not have a lockdown, very few in number, such as Sweden, Belarus and Japan, fared no worse than their regional neighbors. Sweden had rates similar to most European countries while Japan had rates similar to other Asian countries.

Paradoxically, trends of Covid-19 cases and deaths showed an increase after vaccine roll out in Japan and many other countries [Banerjee A. Covid-19 mass vaccination – How much impact at population level?. Med J DY Patil Vidyapeeth [serial online] 2022 [cited 2022 Apr 12];15:293-8. Available from: https://www.mjdrdypv.org/text.asp?2022/15/3/293/342521 ]

Regional factors drive any pandemic beyond human interventions. Improper to have one size fit all treaties. Management of pandemics should be done by local experts who have insight of the epidemiological nuances of the region. So having blanket treaties is not fair to the WHO or to countries facing pandemics differently in different regions.

Dr Amitav Banerjee, MD, Clinical Epidemiologist. Prof & Head, Community Medicine, Dr DY Patil Medical College, Pune, India