WHO Urges Global Pandemic Treaty Amid ‘Disease X’ Warnings

While speaking to attendees at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) summit held in Davos, Switzerland, the World Health Organization (WHO) director urged nations to create a world pandemic agreement to collectively prepare for “Disease X.”
On Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus told WEF attendees that he hoped nations would enter into a world pandemic treaty to “foster an all-of-government and all-of-society approach” to handling future potential outbreaks.
“Disease X,” a hypothetical “unknown pathogen” that has not been created nor identified but scientists warn could be 20 times deadlier than COVID-19, has been used as a “placeholder” for suppositional response scenarios. Researchers at the WHO added “Disease X” to the list of pathogens that could potentially lead to a global pandemic, writing in a 2022 press release, “Disease X is included to indicate an unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic.”
“There are things that are unknown that may happen, and anything happening is a matter of when, not if, so we need to have a placeholder for that, for the diseases we don’t know,” Ghebreyesus said.
“We lost many people [during COVID] because we couldn’t manage them …They could have been saved, but there was no space. There was not enough oxygen. So how can you have a system that can expand when the need comes?” Ghebreyesus asked the audience at the WEF summit. “The pandemic agreement can bring all the experience, all the challenges that we have faced and all the solutions into one,” the WHO director added.
Ghebreyesus said that the agreement could address issues such as improved contact tracing, early warning systems, drug development, and supply chain organization.
“This is a common global interest, and very narrow national interests should not come into the way,” Ghebreyesus explained. “This includes greatly enhancing international co-operation to improve, for example, alert systems, data-sharing, research and local, regional and global production and distribution of medical and public health countermeasures such as vaccines, medicines, diagnostics and personal protective equipment.”
Americans’ response to Ghebreyesus’s warnings regarding “Disease X” and the global treaty has been largely negative. The WHO’s hypothetical pathogen has stirred conspiracies and outrage from many vowing “noncompliance” with any further lockdown attempts.
Ghebreyesus said that the first time the WHO used the term “Disease X” was in 2018, one year before the COVID-19 outbreak, which social media users allege is predictive of a future global disaster.