World Health Organization calls on US and other countries to sign pandemic treaty – warning that Disease X outbreak could kill 20x more people than Covid

The World Health Organization is calling on countries to sign its pandemic treaty – warning the next outbreak could be caused by a disease 20 times deadlier than Covid.

The agency’s director general, Dr Tedors Ghebreyesus, said today that they are already at risk of missing the May deadline for the agreement – which could be a major blow to future generations.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Dr. Ghebreyesus calls for greater cooperation between countries to suppress outbreaks before they spread globally.

He said it is a “matter of when, not if” an even deadlier pandemic will strike, highlighting how unprepared the world was for Covid.

The WHO is currently preparing for Disease

The new pact and a series of updates to existing rules for dealing with pandemics are aimed at strengthening the world’s defenses against new pathogens after the Covid pandemic killed more than 7 million people, according to WHO data.

“I fear that Member States will not fulfill this commitment and that there are still a number of outstanding issues that still need to be resolved,” said Dr Ghebreyesus.

“In my opinion, the failure to comply with the pandemic agreement and the changes to the IHR (International Health Regulations) will be a missed opportunity for which future generations may not forgive us.”

Only once before in the organization’s 75-year history has the WHO succeeded in reaching such an agreement, and that was a Tobacco Control Treaty in 2003.

The tread was first proposed in 2021 and design negotiations began in October 202.

But experts say it could take up to seven years to reach an agreement, pointing out that only two years have passed so far.

Roland Driece, co-chair of the group negotiating the deal, added that it was crucial to make progress now because of the “decreasing urgency” around pandemic prevention.

Dr. Ghebreyesus added at the Davos summit: ‘There are unknown things (diseases) that can happen – and everything that happens is a matter of when, not if.

“So we need a placeholder for that, for the diseases that we don’t know can come, and that’s when we named Disease X.

‘So disease X is a placeholder for an unknown disease.’

He added: ‘Of course there are people who say (disease X) can cause panic.

‘No. It’s actually better to anticipate something that might happen, because it has happened many times in our history, and prepare for it.

‘We should not approach things unprepared. We can also prepare for some unknowns because you can do basic things.”

The WHO treaty – also called the ‘Pandemic Preparedness Treaty’ – is an agreement in which countries share warnings, data and research with each other.

This would help quickly alert the world to a new emerging disease threat, the agency argues, and also speed up the development and rollout of vaccines.

The treaty was first proposed in 2021, and a draft was made available in October 2023.

Member states are now negotiating the text of the agreement before a new version becomes available in May this year – when it could potentially be signed.

Other efforts undertaken by WHO include establishing an early warning center in Berlin in 2021 – where researchers will monitor future outbreaks.

And an mRNA vaccine center in South Africa, opened in April last year, designed to quickly roll out vaccines for poorer countries.

The WHO was accused of failing to act quickly during the rise of Covid, instead giving the impression that the virus did not appear to be spreading between people.

There were also problems with access to vaccines, with many poorer countries struggling to obtain vaccines as they were outcompeted by richer countries.

Disease

Dr. Ghebreyesus spoke at a lecture, flanked by other leaders, titled “new efforts needed to prepare health care systems for the many challenges ahead,” flanked by other virus experts.

Experts don’t yet know which type of virus will cause the next pandemic and be the next Disease X, but scientists have warned for decades that bird flu is the most likely candidate.

Researchers say this is due to the threat of recombination – where high levels of human flu increase the risk of a human also becoming infected with bird flu.

Others have long speculated that disease

Some have even warned that Disease

Dr. Ghebreyesus also warned that many lives were lost when Covid struck because countries were not prepared.

He said: ‘We lost a lot of people because we couldn’t cope with them (in the early days of Covid).

“They could have been saved, but there wasn’t enough room.”

DailyMail.com previously spoke to three virus experts who agreed that a respiratory virus – spread through droplets from coughing and sneezing – would most likely cause the next fast-spreading disease that causes a global shutdown.

They said the infamous Disease pandemic.

It was also possible, they warned, that the outbreak could be worse than the Covid pandemic, pointing to the 1918 flu outbreak, which is estimated to have killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, compared to the seven million deaths from Covid.

The main culprits for the next pandemic, the experts speculated, were:nothing coronavirus and bird flu – a virus that infects birds, but may also spread to humans.