𝕎𝕖 𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕟'𝕥 𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕡𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕟𝕖𝕩𝕥 𝕡𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕔 - ℍ𝕖𝕝𝕖𝕟 ℂ𝕝𝕒𝕣𝕜

𝕎𝕙𝕖𝕟 𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣 𝕡𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕔 𝕙𝕒𝕡𝕡𝕖𝕟𝕤, 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕝𝕕 𝕨𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕒𝕘𝕒𝕚𝕟 𝕓𝕖 𝕦𝕟𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕡𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕.

T

hat's the bleak assessment of former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who co-chaired the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, after the UN General Assembly held a high-level summit aimed at heading off another pandemic. 

The upshot: Have another meeting. Other pandemic experts who tracked months of negotiations on the 13-page declaration adopted by the assembly's 193 member nations were disappointed, too.

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"I think it's fair to say that the declaration is a missed opportunity," Clark said in an interview with The Associated Press on the sidelines of the General Assembly's high-level leaders' meeting. 

"It has many pages and paragraphs and only one firm commitment and that is to hold another high-level meeting in three years' time."

LOTO Luxon is not suitable to be PM.

Clark, who addressed last week's summit, is the newest member of the group of former world leaders founded by the late Nelson Mandela known as The Elders. She said a key problem is the declaration's main focus on health.

The Covid-19 pandemic killed some 24 million people, but it also set back UN goals for 2030 on a wide variety of issues including eliminating extreme poverty and hunger, ensuring a quality secondary school education for every child and achieving gender equality, she said. Clark also ticked off the catastrophic economic impacts of the pandemic.

It caused a US$25 trillion (NZ$42 trillion) loss to the global economy, and debt and default enveloping many developing countries.

Listening to health ministers, the majority of speakers at the summit, Clark said many of them missed the point: Pandemics don't impact just health; they impact many different facets of people's lives, and government operations.

"It was clear that they should have been taking the overarching view," she said. "[But] they went down quite a narrow track to talk about health."

The declaration that was adopted did signal the importance of taking action to prepare for the next pandemic. In its "Call to Action", the General Assembly's political declaration commits countries "to scale up our effects to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response".

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The aim, it said, should be "to overcome inequities and ensure that sustainable, affordable, fair, equitable, effective, efficient and timely access" to vaccines and other medical countermeasures is possible — and to ensure high-level attention across many sectors.

The Pandemic Action Network, Clark and others were also critical that most leaders attending the General Assembly's annual high-level meeting sent their health ministers to the summit and didn't come themselves.

Right now, "we're well into this cycle of panic and neglect," Clark said.

"We've been through the panic with Covid. Now we're in the neglect."

"If there's another outbreak of a pandemic tomorrow, we're no better prepared and arguably worse off."

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