U.N. hosts the world’s weirdest summit on Covid-19

It took the United Nations General Assembly nine months to arrange a special session dedicated to discussing the Covid-19 pandemic. No one, not even the organizers, knew what to expect from the two-day virtual summit that kicked off Thursday.

The prevailing mood so far has been one of head-scratching: about why the event took so long to organize, and what point there was in holding it now.

UNGA President Volkan Bozkir, who pressed for the summit, argued that “the world is looking to the U.N. for leadership; this is a test for multilateralism.” If that’s the case, multilateralism is likely to fail that test — if it hasn’t already.

Bozkir outlined a coming decade where the world simply tries to get back to where it was at the beginning of 2020, meaning the U.N.’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are already effectively out of reach, thanks to a crisis “unlike any other crisis in the 75-year history of the United Nations.”

Bozkir’s goal is big — to “shake up how things are done” in the global Covid-19 response — but the means are meager. The world’s actions in 2020 have so far failed to match lofty goals about fairness and resilience.

A U.N.-backed accelerator for Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines has raised only $10 billion of the $38 billion it needs across 2020 and 2021, yet summit organizers are not seeking funding pledges or even circulating a draft declaration.

By assembling 141 speakers without a plan this week, Bozkir's “overdue and much needed moment of reckoning,” became a discussion with no outcomes or accountability.

Leaders presented shopping lists of interconnected health, economic and environmental problems, but few took responsibility for solving immediate vaccine and therapeutic problems.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the only leader of a major country to directly urge more funding for the the ACT Accelerator, and in her one-minute statement said WHO “is an institution [that] needs to be strengthened” because “it is patently clear that this global and multi-faceted crisis can only be surmounted by global action.” The remarks were a rebuke to President Donald Trump's approach of “vaccine nationalism,” which he pushed at November’s G-20 summit, and a criticism of the current unenforceable system of international health regulations.

Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg said her country plans to allocate an additional $220 million to the accelerator this year, bringing its total contribution so far to just over $500 million.

If anything, the global health crisis has shone a light on just how much multilateralism has unraveled after four years of global retreat by the United States.

Top speakers at the U.N. forum on Covid-19 include Merkel, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron, but many governments sent their B-list: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is representing the U.S., while fewer than half the leaders of U.N.’s members taped video speeches. Vaccine scientists also have speaking slots: “Maybe these brilliant scientists will announce something, I have no idea,” said Brenden Varma, Bozkir’s spokesperson.

Even among the diplomatic delegations slated to attend, there’s a striking lack of enthusiasm. Azerbaijan, which proposed the summit on behalf of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, declined a request for comment. “We have other things going on,” said the spokesperson of one EU country, adding “we don’t expect any outcome and overall the event is about seven months too late.”

“The reason we’re doing this session is because Bozkir wanted it,” said the spokesperson of one U.N. Security Council permanent member. Varma, Bozkir’s spokesperson, agreed the UNGA president is the driving force behind the meeting, seeing it as a launching pad for a yearlong campaign for equitable vaccine distribution.

Creaking multilateralism

Some diplomats said the most important role for the event is to remind the world of the dangers of Trump's “vaccine nationalism.”

“It’s about assuring the multilateral dimension of the response is still in people’s minds,” said a United Kingdom government spokesperson.

Varma said “the biggest reason to have this meeting is to use the U.N.’s convening power” to get scientists — including those from vaccine developers BioNTech and AstraZeneca — talking with one another.

The implication is that despite the pandemic consuming most of the U.N.’s money and attention through 2020, the organization hasn’t achieved these connections already.

The international vaccine alliance GAVI, the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations have had more success with their joint scheme known as COVAX, which is aimed at ensuring all countries get access to vaccines for their most at-risk people.

With 189 governments signed up, the COVAX facility is “the most promising globally coordinated solution” for getting vaccines to all people and reopening economies,” a GAVI spokesperson said. GAVI is asking governments to contribute “at least an additional $5 billion in 2021,” and that all drug makers join the facility.

Pfizer and BioNTech, whose vaccine won approval Wednesday in the U.K. , and Moderna, which is seeking regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe for its vaccine, are among the drugmakers yet to sign a deal.

Lack of big ideas and coordination

With the exception of European Council President Charles Michel — who pushed the idea of a global pandemic treaty, modeled after the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control — the leaders’ pre-recorded video speeches mostly rehashed 2020 breakthroughs and regrets.

Michel said the world needs to get real about the increasing number of pandemics and agree to a treaty within the framework of the WHO. He wants to include rules on everything from surveillance of animal-to-human virus transmission, to acceleration of treatment and vaccine research, and as yet unspecified requirements that would make health care systems and supply chains more resilient. “Let us mobilize and pool our experiences so that we help make the world and humanity more just and more resilient,” Michel urged.

The idea, which he has also floated at the G-20, has raised questions across diplomatic circles in New York, Geneva and even inside other EU institutions. It doesn’t appear to be related to the ongoing WHO reform talks and also would preempt an Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, commissioned by WHO’s World Health Assembly, which is scheduled to report in May 2021.

Another committee chaired by Lothar Wieler, head of Germany’s infectious disease institute, is looking into potential changes to today’s relatively toothless International Health Regulations, which govern how countries should respond to outbreaks.

Olof Skoog, the European Union’s ambassador to the U.N., defended the idea as part of the EU’s effort to “invest in the global system.”

The political tides of the U.N. bureaucracy are already shifting away from Covid-19. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres delivered a major speech Wednesday, saying that the “central objective of the United Nations for 2021 is to build a truly global coalition for carbon neutrality.” Guterres is hoping to build on China, Japan and South Korea joining the European Union in committing to net zero emissions, along with the incoming Biden administration, which has promised the same.

— David Herszenhorn contributed to this report.