Treaties, treatments and time travel

The World Health Organization wants to ensure the mistakes that turned Covid-19 into a global crisis won’t be repeated. It’s with this in mind that the UN body has been working on an international treaty setting out a joined up strategy we all follow to tackle future pandemics. But critics - including some right-wing MPs here in the UK - say a new agreement could give the WHO too much power - which might allow decision-makers in Geneva to implement lockdowns.

Anjana - What was really interesting about it was that it really was a pandemic that stopped the world. And the thing that got us out of it was vaccines, other countermeasures like drugs and so on. But we also had the terrible experience of lockdowns, global supply chains being disrupted, overwhelmed hospitals. It's been a learning experience, I would say. And also I think it taught us that a coordinated response, both within countries and internationally, would benefit us in the pandemics that are, I'm pretty sure, still to come.

Chris - One commentator put it to me, right at the beginning, that almost a bigger threat than the virus itself was the contagion of misinformation. And she was absolutely right. In many respects, we have repeatedly seen reports that we've been misled, many times in some cases, by governments. In some cases by social media clap trap, but misinformation has certainly prominently featured.

Anjana - What was really interesting in the early days actually was the World Health Organisation saying that we weren't just dealing with an epidemic, we were also dealing with an "info-demic." That's really a new phenomenon given the rise of social media, the ease with which people can access multiple sources of news which are not always verified. And what really surprised me was how influential some of those channels became - for example, the supposed link between Coronavirus and 5G. And I think when you have this very febrile atmosphere where you had governments suddenly telling people what to do, telling them to stay inside their homes, people were scared. And I think those are the very difficult high pressure situations where misinformation can flourish.

Chris - The other problem we encountered was that there was very much a "me too" mentality, which was being used as a stick to beat policymakers. You'd see one country doing one thing, and it might be a bit more vigorous than another although we didn't know better, governments were then being held to account: "they're doing this, why are we not doing that?" It seemed like there was a race to see who could be most strict at certain points in the pandemic led by very vocal individuals fueled by social media.

Anjana - You are right. In terms of lockdowns, we know that they are bad for many, many groups in society. They curtail our freedoms in a way that nobody ever wants. And I think they're very much seen as failures by public health. If you have to lock down, it means you haven't really implemented effective infection control measures beforehand. So we had this lurch, didn't we, from libertarianism, 'keep everything open', to lockdowns. But I think in terms of our learning, what does it mean now? I think everyone should be questioning having to take these drastic actions. What can we do before then to stop epidemics getting to that stage? What can we do in surveillance? What can we do to nip these things in the bud at a much earlier stage.

Chris - In that respect though, the World Health Organisation are now in the throes of drawing together international treaties with people signing up to try to come up with some kind of consensus so that there is less beating about the bush, "me too" thinking and disorganisation which is what was dominating some of the early responses to the pandemic. What are they actually advocating for and do you think that it's realistic?

Anjana - The treaty goes back to March 2021 when we put ourselves back at that time, and it's very hard to do that now. Everyone thought "never again." The world was so disrupted, and so global leaders, including Boris Johnson, came together. They all put their names to a document that said, we're going to go for this treaty. And the words were that no single government or multilateral agency can address this threat alone. And the idea, I think, was to look back on some of the things that were real sticking points in the pandemics; how do we share data? You've got the current controversy over the origins of Covid 19, how do we go into labs and know what's happening? How do vaccines get made and produced in a way that suits everybody? And how does personal protective equipment get distributed? So that's what the treaty is meant to do, to try to have a slightly more coordinated international effort to a future pandemic response. The sticking points, bearing in mind that the WHO doesn't have the powers to march into countries or compel them to do anything, are things like; what qualifies as a pandemic? How does the treaty fit in with the existing regulations? What principles is it trying to uphold? Trying to protect sovereignty of countries to transparency, how do you get the global supply chain to work and who pays for pandemic preparedness and response, for example? There is supposed to be agreement by 2024. I think many people see that as quite ambitious.

Chris - A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, though. And the weak link here in terms of cooperation, collaboration, transparency is the country where it was first detected and where it might... - we've had George Gao, the former CDC lead in China now admitting that it could well have begun in China, we just don't know - but China remain that weak link. They don't seem to cooperate. So are we really beating our heads against the wall with this? We'll all sign up to this with all good intentions, but the weak link remains?

Anjana - In terms of the treaty itself, multiple global leaders have signed up to it very enthusiastically, or at least signed up to a version of it. We'll have to wait and see what happens with China and how the future investigation into the origin of Covid play out. Countries have sovereignties, but they also have leaky borders. So what one country does will affect their neighbors. These are really, really tricky conversations. But I think any modern concept of geopolitics has to include pandemics and how we deal with health threats now because we've seen how bad things can get.

NASA has been holding its first public meeting on its study of UFOs. The panel - which was set up last year - has been looking at data on so-called unidentified anomalous phenomena. Nasa has said that a staggering 800 incidents are under investigation. Dr David Whitehouse is a space scientist and author and he’s been watching NASA’s public meeting on unidentified anomalous phenomena.

David - Well, it was part of an approach to UFOs that is quite novel in the sense that, in the past, scientists have stayed away from this subject because of the association with conspiracies, with spaceships and aliens and abductions and coverups. But, a few years ago, the New York Times showed a few videos taken from the cockpits of fighter pilots showing some very strange objects indeed. And that started the thaw with scientists saying well, actually, perhaps somewhere in the mix, somewhere it got lost in all this, there might be a phenomenon that is worth studying. So part of the process of actually building a framework to study this, to find those strange events, NASA has held this meeting. And it was a very good example of laying the groundwork of how the United States airspace is surveilled, what they can see, what instruments and sensors they use, and how many of the things they have seen over a year are anomalous and needed some sort of extra explanation. So it was a very interesting change of direction and a very interesting scientific groundwork for this study.

Chris - Was this really an attempt to disabuse some people of these conspiracy theories to try to bring more science to bear on this? So rather than it just being spooky things happening, let's look at this scientifically, let's have a proper framework through which we can collect the information but also be more transparent about it. Because that's been the other thing that's fueled a lot of these conspiracy theories, isn't it? That it's hard to access some of the information. It's all classified.

David - Well, in some respects, the Department of Defense data has been classified, although that has been coming out over the past few years. But if you're implying that it's a way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, then exactly that. If you look at UFO's, unidentified aerial phenomena, you find a whole load of stuff, a whole load of debate and argument, conspiracy theories, mostly very bad video of things which are obviously nothing unusual at all. So this is to try to get rid of that and ask the basic question: is there something there? And the thing which I drew from this is, look at air traffic controllers. There are 14,000 air traffic controllers in the United States. There are 16 and a half million flights a year and 45,000 flights a day. And yet, with all their data, with 20,000 airports, the man was asked, "how many anomalous things have you seen?" And his answer was three to five. And they were very strange, but a very small percentage of what is the most intensely guarded airspace in the world. And that data did not include the military surveillance of the United States Air Force. So they are gathering the groundwork for this. Don't get the wrong impression, there are some observations that people have had that are genuinely strange - it's now to actually focus on those and get rid of the rest. That's what first part of this meeting was about,

Chris - What is public opinion, really? Where does the barometer sit on this? Do most people think that this is rubbish? Or do most people think there's something in this? Because to my mind as a sort of rational scientist, I find it hard to reconcile that someone who had a technology enabling them to conquer space and time and vast distances, which is what you'd have to do in order to be able to travel the sorts of distances we know are involved in getting across the universe to come and visit us, what could they possibly need to learn about our planet by coming here that they couldn't already know?

David - Well, that's an interesting question in the sense that it's not impossible that we could be being visited, or that tomorrow an alien spaceship could arrive in orbit around the earth and start talking to us. So it's not impossible. And we do not know what aliens look like, what their spaceships would look like. So when we see something strange and unusual, if somebody says that it's a strange atmospheric phenomena, because we don't know what an alien spaceship looks like, you cannot logically totally say it's not an alien because we don't know what aliens would look like. But, overall, the interesting thing about these phenomena is trying to bring the science into it. Because if you look at America in particular, and to a certain extent this country, there is a vast public fascination and hunger for alien information. If you go to America, you see television programmes and people going to concerts, on speaking and presentation tours, talking about aliens, ancient aliens, UFO encounters, and they are full of people. There are so many millions of people who want this stuff, who are entertained by it or are convinced by it. And yet here we come with a scientific approach, which is certainly going to show there's a phenomenon there, but it's nothing to do with aliens. I think we know that already. That won't convince very many people.

Chris - So your argument is that it's more that there are unexplained phenomena and that there's something intriguing and interesting about them, they don't have to be aliens, they're important and they're worth looking at regardless of what causes them to happen?

David - Oh, exactly. The question is, is there a phenomenon there? It's not a question of, is this evidence of aliens? Because I think it's pretty obvious from all the evidence of alien encounters, so to speak, that we are not being visited.

Chris - We will have to wait and see. I guess the horrible pun is 'watch this space, isn't it?'