International negotiations to prepare for the next pandemic suffer from the same unwillingness to challenge profit as do climate summits, argues John Clarke

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and its member states are developing an accord on pandemic prevention and an International Negotiating Body (INB) has been established to take it forward. Given the devastating impact of the global spread of Covid and the very real threat of future pandemics, it is worth considering how much trust should be placed in this initiative.

Many of the issues under consideration by those who are developing the accord are very valid and important. As a compilation draft emerges, discussions have turned to ‘research and development related to pandemic products, particularly vaccines and medicines (Article 9); access to these products and benefit-sharing, including sharing genomic sequencing of whatever pathogen is causing the pandemic (Article 12) and supply chain logistics (Article 13).’

France’s representative suggested that: ‘We must take into consideration the ties between people and animals, both wild and domestic, and the environment in order to understand the fundamental factors and the trends that lead to the emergence and re-emergence of diseases.’

Clearly, those involved in these discussions are not unaware of the key factors that would have to be addressed in order for the risk of global pandemics to be substantially reduced. However, if we make the obvious comparison to the response of governments to climate change, the fear immediately arises that pious declarations and agreements in principle are likely to emerge in place of binding commitments and effective action.

Rather ominously in this regard, representatives of the African countries are already expressing the concern that an ‘informal discussion’ process is being used to exclude the proposals they wish to advance and to block the measures that must be taken, if their populations aren’t to face massively disproportionate risks and consequences in the event of future pandemics.

Era of pandemics

The spread of Covid was one dreadful manifestation of capitalism’s assault on the natural world and it isn’t necessary to turn to any radical analysis to find the evidence that supports this contention. In 2020, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) issued a ‘report on biodiversity and pandemics’.

The report warned that pandemics are likely to ‘emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy and kill more people than COVID-19 unless there is a transformative change in the global approach to dealing with infectious diseases.’ Though the IPBES diplomatically used the term ‘human activities’, rather than naming the capitalist system, its findings were remarkably clear.

The report concluded that the same factors that ‘drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment. Changes in the way we use land; the expansion and intensification of agriculture; and unsustainable trade, production and consumption disrupt nature and increase contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people. This is the path to pandemics.’

Based on these findings, we have only to mention what is pointedly left unsaid in order to draw out the vital conclusions. All of the destructive activities that are outlined, particularly those of industrial agriculture, flow from the profit-driven nature of the way they are pursued. A more sustainable approach means challenging the power of capital, and that is something those who will draft the upcoming WHO pandemic accord can’t possibly consider. They may identify the main elements of the problem but, like all comparable international bodies, they are incapable of accepting the social and economic changes that would be necessary to solve them.

If the prevention of pandemics requires more than the WHO is able to embrace, things aren’t very much better when it comes to effective responses to future outbreaks. We have had several years to observe how capitalist states responded to the global spread of Covid, and a very grim picture has emerged.

The onset of the pandemic produced a dire threat to public health, with populations being infected and sickening at very alarming rates. Moreover, the danger of more lethal variants was ever present and has not been eliminated even now. Yet, the readiness of governments to put health needs and social cohesion above the needs of short-term profit making proved to be very limited.

Once it started to spread, Covid played out along the lines of social and racial inequality that are deeply rooted in even the wealthiest capitalist countries. London’s three borough ‘Covid Triangle’ had many international counterparts. The erosion of public healthcare and other public services during the neoliberal decades opened the way for the virus. Regardless of any accord issued by the WHO, we may be sure that future pandemics will be able to run along the socially determined fault lines of infection.

The demands of ‘open for business’ proved dominant and they ultimately prevailed on a global scale. When Boris Johnson uttered his infamous ‘let the bodies pile high’ remark, he was only expressing in particularly crass terms a set of priorities to which government leaders across the world were beholden.

When vaccines were developed, their effective distribution on a global scale was undermined by the profit needs and ‘intellectual property rights’ of Big Pharma. Populations of the poorest countries were simply abandoned and an utter catastrophe was entirely possible. Yet, despite token gestures and empty assurances, the regime of ‘vaccine imperialism’ was preserved intact, with the Western powers thwarting the wishes of poorer WHO member states.

There is little reason to suppose that another global pandemic would be dealt with substantially differently than Covid. The immediate threat of social dislocation caused by rampant infection would produce reluctant emergency measures, but a sustained protection of public health could not be expected. It is simply inconceivable that any accord issued by the WHO would neutralise the logic of capitalist accumulation to any significant degree.

Talk vs action

The developing WHO initiative serves a function that is very similar to the ongoing international summits that are organised on climate and biodiversity. A false sense of hope is generated that the horse trading that goes on at these gatherings will produce agreements that seriously respond to environmental degradation. However, the government leaders, corporate lobbyists and NGOs always emerge with inconclusive results and promises to do better next time.

Worse than this, however, the great investment of time and energy that is put into trying to influence the outcomes of these events detracts from the task of building the movements, the social struggles and the mass action that could force the hand of those in power.

We may be sure that the present deliberations on a pandemic accord will drag on and ultimately produce a document that, for all its rhetorical flourish, offers no real challenge to the profit-driven activity that has brought us to the point of recurring health crises on an international scale. The accord won’t change the conditions that can unleash pandemics or the factors that open the way for them once they have broken out.

The evolutionary biologist, Rob Wallace, has stated that ‘healing the rift between ecology and the economy driving diseases and climate damage at the heart of modern agriculture involves imprinting a different political philosophy upon the landscape.’

If that is the standard that must be met, we can’t imagine for a moment that the World Health Organisation and the governments it brings to the table will take any such direction. On the contrary, such a transformation can only be won in a struggle against them and the global system they represent.