Category: Covid-19

Pressley Has Led Efforts in Congress to Expand Access to Long COVID Treatment, Invest in Research, and More

WASHINGTON Today, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) issued the following statement marking Long COVID Awareness Day while continuing her fight in Congress to support the millions of people in America still living with COVID-19.

Long COVID remains a national crisis in America that demands a bold, federal response that ensures no one is ignored, left out, or left behind in our recovery. On Long COVID Awareness Day, Im proud to join national and grassroots advocates across the country to demand action from lawmakers to provide our COVID Long Haulers with the resources and treatment they need and deserve, said Rep. Pressley. Congress must immediately pass my TREAT Long COVID Act with Rep. Beyer and Rep. Blunt Rochester to expand access to Long COVID clinics and help Long Haulers access care right in their communities, as well as fully fund the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, and make bold federal investments in Long COVID research. As we heal from the COVID-19 pandemic, I want our Long Haulers to know that we see them, their experiences are real, and we will never stop fighting for them.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people with Long COVIDmay experience a combination of symptoms, ranging from extreme fatigue and cognitive dysfunction to muscle pain and gastrointestinal issues, to difficulty breathing, insomnia, and heart palpitations. Across the country,nearly one in five adultswho have had COVID-19 still suffer from symptoms of Long COVID, and more than 65 million people are suffering worldwide. These complications affect people of all ages and all walks of life, with disproportionate impacts reported on women and people of color.

In Congress, Rep. Pressley, along with Representatives Don Beyer and Lisa Blunt Rochester, has introduced the TREAT Long COVID Act to increase access to medical care and treatment for communities and individuals struggling with Long COVID and its associated conditions. The bill would fund the expansion of Long COVID clinics and empower health care providersincluding community health centers and local public health departmentsto treat Long COVID patients in their own communities. A summary of the bill can be foundhere, and the bill text is availablehere.

Rep. Pressley has also held a series ofvirtual and in-person roundtable discussions with patients, health care providers, and advocates in the Massachusetts 7thto discuss the Long COVID crisis. Watch their roundtablehere.

Congresswoman Pressley has nominated two constituents to serve on HHS Federal Advisory Committee on Long COVID.

Rep. Pressley has been a longtime champion for people suffering from Long COVID and for disaggregated demographic data on COVID-19 to better address the pandemics disproportionate impact on communities of color.

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On Long COVID Awareness Day, Pressley Keeps Up Fight for COVID Long Haulers - Representative Ayanna Pressley

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented exposure to stressors driven by fears of a novel and deadly disease, intense uncertainty, and resulting isolation measures, which in turn resulted in increases in anxiety for many. According to new research however, individuals who were in therapy for anxiety prior to the start of the pandemic did not experience upticks in their symptoms throughout this exceptionally challenging time.

The new research suggests that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) provided tools to help individuals with anxiety to manage their symptoms in the face of these intense stressors, according to the study's authors. The study, led by psychologists at McLean Hospital, a member of Mass General Brigham, and Touro University, published March 13th in PLOS One.

Our research suggests that CBT and DBT can offer major benefits to protect individuals' mental health amidst a major world catastrophe and period of upheaval. People who have been treated for anxiety know that fighting it is not helpful, and that there are tools to help accept the current realities of their situations," he added. "In some ways, having a previous anxiety disorder before a crisis occurs can be a blessing."

DavidH. Rosmarin, PhD, ABPP, lead study author,clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital, and associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School

For the study, researchers compared the treatment trajectories of 764 individuals who participated in outpatient therapy and divided them into four groups based on when they initiated treatment: pre-pandemic (start date on or prior to 12/31/2019), pandemic-onset (from 01/01/2020 to 03/31/2020), during-pandemic (from 04/01/2020 through 12/31/2020), and post-pandemic once vaccines became available (on or after 01/01/2021).

Anxiety was measured at intake and at each subsequent session using the GAD-7 questionnaire, which assesses for anxiety symptoms. Then, the researchers analyzed the trajectories of anxiety and compared the four groups. Therapy consisted of CBT and DBT.

Their findings revealed that overall, patients presented with moderate anxiety when they began treatment, which rapidly decreased within 25 days of starting therapy, and gradually declined to mild anxiety over the remainder of their sessions. When comparing the four groups of patients, the researchers found no substantive differences between groups, suggesting that treatment effects were robust to environmental stressors related to the pandemic. Moreover, among patients who were in treatment at the start of the pandemic, the researchers did not detect an increase in anxiety during the initial acute phase of COVID-19 (March 20, 2020 through July 1, 2020).

We were surprised. We thought that during the height of the pandemic and before vaccines were available, patients would show increased anxiety and that therapy would be less effective but that was not the case."

Steven Pirutinsky, PhD, study co-author, assistant professor at Graduate School of Social Work at Touro University

Studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic adversely impacted mental health, with measurable increases in anxiety from the pandemic's onset in early 2020 through the fist availability of vaccinations in early 2021. One report from the World Health Organization found global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic.

"There is a widespread misperception that anxiety is a risk factor for people crumbling and not being able to function," says Rosmarin. "However, when people receive evidence-based psychotherapy and learn skills to cope, they can become more resilient than those who have never had anxiety at all."

Limitations of the study include that the participant pool, while demographically and clinically diverse, consisted primarily of highly educated individuals geographically specific to the northeastern United States. The pandemic-onset group was also smaller than the others, which may be attributed to limited availability of in-person therapy around that time. The study also did not look at other mental health measures, including depression and substance use. More research is needed to gain insights into how these findings may be impacted in other regions of the country, and conditions aside from anxiety disorders.

Source:

Journal reference:

Rosmarin, D. H.,et al.(2024) Response to anxiety treatment before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.PLOS ONE.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296949.

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Anxiety therapy prior to COVID-19 pandemic shields against increased stress - News-Medical.Net

Up to 5.8 million young people have long COVID, according to a recent study and parents like Amanda Goodhart are looking for answers.

She says her 6-year old son Logan caught COVID multiple times. But even months later, his symptoms didn't get better.

"To see him struggle to stay awake, or crying and saying he doesn't feel good, it's heartbreaking, it's demoralizing, because there's not a lot of treatment options," she told CBS News.

Study author Dr. Rachel Gross of NYU's Grossman School of Medicine says one major challenge in tracking the illness is that symptoms can vary.

click to expand

"Long COVID can look different in different children, that not everybody has the same symptoms and that it can look different depending on when the symptoms start," she says.

Some common long COVID symptoms in kids include:

Logan has also been dealing with circulatory and gastrointestinal problems, and he gets tired even from things like standing in line.

Doctors say most children with long COVID recover over several months, but about a third experience symptoms even one year later.

Goodhart says it's been frustrating, adding they've tried multiple treatments with only moderate improvement.

"It's terrible, there's nothing worse than seeing your child go through something you can't fix," she says.

The research also shows long COVID can raise the chances of a child developing type 1 diabetes. And it can even be deadly, leading to multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes the syndrome as a "rare but serious condition associated with COVID-19 in which different body parts become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs."

"This study was urgently needed because there are so many questions that need to be answered about pediatric long COVID," Gross says.

The Goodharts hope more attention is given to studying long COVID so more effective treatments can be found.

Sara Moniuszko is a health and lifestyle reporter at CBSNews.com. Previously, she wrote for USA Today, where she was selected to help launch the newspaper's wellness vertical. She now covers breaking and trending news for CBS News' HealthWatch.

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Up to 5.8 million kids have long COVID, study says. One mother discusses the "heartbreaking" search for answers. - CBS News

By Frey Lindsay

Executive Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped migration and mobility in Europe, and some of the impacts still linger. In many ways, Europe was better prepared than other regions to respond to the pandemic and its effects on cross-border mobility. Europe had strong coordinating institutions, an existing freedom of movement agreement, world-leading scientific and public-health capacities, and stronger social protection systems and economies than most regions. Despite these advantages, cross-border travel shut down, migrant and refugee flows dropped, and migrant worker unemployment spiked across the region in the pandemics early phase.

The first months of the pandemic saw an unprecedented shutdown in cross-border mobility. Even borders within Europes Schengen Area of free movement were reinstated, with land border controls and travel bans for nonresidents maintained for several months in 2020. As the virus circulated across Europe, countries began to restart mobility through testing and isolation, exemptions, and a traffic light system to assign travel measures according to a travelers region of origin or transit, based on different metrics of risk. However, a lack of coordination undermined these early efforts. The real game changer was the EU Digital COVID Certificate, which by mid-2021 allowed countries to verify a travelers proof of vaccination, testing, or recovery from prior infection. This system was widely adopted and helped Europe move toward targeting travel measures to each persons risk profile rather than restricting travel from entire countries. Thus, the European case offers some hope that regional cooperation can work, while nonetheless underscoring the challenges to cooperation on migration in times of crisis.

The pandemic had a significant and sudden impact on labor mobility, within and into Europe, with implications for employment and labor markets throughout the region. Initially, migrant worker unemployment rose in most sectors, with the gap between migrant and native-born unemployment rates growing across all European countries. But some policy decisions, including regularization policies, mitigated some of the worst impacts. Trends include:

The pandemics impacts on migrant workers were more severe in countries where migrants often have insecure contracts and work in sectors such as tourism that were devastated by the pandemic (e.g., Spain and Sweden), than in those with more generous job retention programs and social protection (e.g., France and Switzerland). Migrant employment began to recover relatively quickly, but it took until 2021 to begin growing at pre-pandemic rates. Many workers from other EU Member States returned home in the first months of the pandemic, particularly to Eastern Europe, meaning the number of intra-EU workers dropped more than the number of third-country national workers in EU labor markets. This seems to be both because moving home to another European country was comparatively easier and because intra-EU workers were more willing to leave as it appeared easier for them to return than it would be for a third-country national who might have to reapply for visas or save funds for the journey.

Governments also tapped into existing populations to meet labor demand. As migrant workers returned to Eastern Europe and other regions, Italy and Spain gave regular status to many irregular migrants, and France tried to attract unemployed or furloughed native-born workers into agriculture. Governments also exempted essential workers (such as farm workers) from border restrictions or quickly expanded visa routes and recruited new workers for the agricultural harvest, as in Germany and the United Kingdom.

Virtually all types of migration dropped in 2020: first residence permits for third-country nationals decreased by 24 percent in just one year. Governments prioritized restarting labor migration, but most other types of movement recovered far more slowly. The impacts of COVID-19 travel measures on migration were starkest in the first two years of the pandemic, which are the primary focus of this report, and were felt by both irregular and regular mobility, although the former recovered quicker than the latter.

International student flows dropped precipitously, with first residence permits for education dropping more than any other category in 2020. Although easing travel restrictions allowed students to return to Europe in 2021, student arrivals have generally been slow to recover to pre-pandemic levels. The United Kingdom, however, announced a new visa that allows graduate students to work for two years after graduation, prompting a significant increase in issuance of student visas in 2021 that exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 55 percent.

Refugee resettlement remains low, but asylum applications have rebounded. Resettlement to Europe was more resilient than in regions and countries with stricter border controls (e.g., Australia), but refugee resettlements declined 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 and remained less than three-quarters of pre-pandemic levels by 2021. By contrast, asylum applications dropped in March 2020 and stayed low as European countries adjusted to telework and remote asylum proceedings, but application numbers began to recover by June and met pre-pandemic levels in mid-2021.

Irregular migration exceeds pre-pandemic levels, but government policies have contributed to a shift toward more dangerous routes. Stricter border policies in Cyprus and Greece, justified by those governments in part by the pandemics public-health risks, caused the number of irregular arrivals in those countries to drop and numbers in Italy and Spain to jump. As migrants turned to more dangerous irregular migration routes, recorded deaths in the Mediterranean increased by 41 percent in 2021.

The contrasting recoveries of different forms of migration to and within Europe underscore the importance of effective migration policymaking in times of uncertainty. Three policy trends emerged within Europe and continue to shape migration patterns and policies even as the focus on the pandemic has waned. First, the success of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, despite privacy and equity concerns, represented a shift back to regional cooperation on borders and offers a tool to help countries re-open quickly if a future health crisis shuts down mobility. Second, the enduring shift to digital migration and asylum processing sparked by office closures and social distancing will force policymakers to balance the advantages of streamlined digitalization with the risks to privacy and data protection. Third, COVID-19s shutdown in global labor mobility and related labor shortages accelerated a policy focus on skilled migration programs, which will be crucial to meeting future labor demand while building human capital and socioeconomic opportunities in Europe. Recognizing these trends and the lessons of the pandemic can equip policymakers in Europe and beyond to prepare contingency plans for the next public-health crisis and strategically move toward a more effective and coordinated plan for migration.

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Coordination breakdown: the impacts of COVID-19 on migration in Europe - World - ReliefWeb

It was four years ago on March 12, 2020 that the coronavirus brought the curtain down on Broadway for what was initially supposed to be a monthlong shutdown, but which wound up lasting a year and a half.

The pandemic brought live events and big gatherings to a halt, silencing orchestras, shutting museums and movie theaters and leaving sports teams playing to empty stadiums dotted with cardboard cutouts.

Now, four years later, audiences are coming back, but the recovery has been uneven. Here is a snapshot of where things stand now:

On Broadway, overall attendance is still down about 17 percent: 9.3 million seats have been filled in the current season as of March 3, down from 11.1 million at the same point in 2020. Box office grosses are down, too: Broadway shows have grossed $1.2 billion so far this season, 14 percent below the level in early March of 2020.

Broadway has always had more flops than successes, and the post-pandemic period has been challenging for producers and investors, especially those involved in new musicals. Three pop productions that have opened since the pandemic Six, about the wives of King Henry VIII, MJ, about Michael Jackson and & Juliet, which imagines an alternate history for Shakespeares tragic heroine are ongoing hits, but far more musicals have flamed out. The industry is looking with some trepidation toward next month, when a large crop of new shows is set to open.

Many nonprofit theaters around the country are also struggling attracting fewer subscribers and producing fewer shows and some have closed. One bright spot has been the touring Broadway market, which has been booming.

Michael Paulson

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Four Years After Covid-19 Shutdown, Are Audiences Back? - The New York Times

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) South Carolinas top doctor came before a small group of state senators on Thursday to tell them he thinks a bill overhauling how public health emergencies are handled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has some bad ideas, concerns echoed by Gov. Henry McMaster.

As drafted, the bill would prevent mandating vaccines unless they have been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration for 10 years. That means that health care providers would be blocked from requiring flu vaccines or other shots that get yearly updates for ever-changing viruses, said Dr. Edward Simmer, director of the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

In addition to loosening restrictions on who can visit people in isolation, the measure would also require symptom-free patients to be released from quarantine well before some infectious diseases begin to show outward signs, Simmer said at a Thursday hearing.

There are a number of issues that we believe where this bill would cause harm to the people of South Carolina and would in fact cause unnecessary death amongst people of South Carolina during a public health crisis because it would prevent us from taking actions that could save lives, Simmer said.

The bill passed the Senate subcommittee on a 4-3 vote, but with eight weeks to go in the General Assemblys session, it still has to get through the bodys Medical Affairs Committee and a vote on the Senate floor before it can even be sent to the House.

In a further sign of the hurdles the bill faces, McMaster sent the subcommittee a letter saying placing overbroad restrictions on the authority of public health officials, law enforcement officers, first responders, and emergency management professionals responding to emerging threats and disasterswhether public health or otherwise is a bad idea.

A similar subcommittee met in September, where many speakers sewed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy, as well as distrust in the scientific establishment.

Members on Thursday listened to Simmer and took up some amendments on his concern and promised to discuss his other worries with the bill.

You are making some good points, Dr. Simmer. Im writing them all down, Republican Sen. Richard Cash of Powdersville said.

The proposal would require health officials to release someone from quarantine if they didnt show symptoms for five days. Simmers said people with diseases like measles, meningitis, bird flu and Ebola are contagious, but may not show symptoms for a week or more.

I dont think we would want after 10 days to release a person known to be infected with Ebola into the public, Simmer said.

Supporters of the bill said they werent happy that during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic hospitals and nursing homes put patients into isolation. Allowing quicker releases from isolation and letting more people to visit someone in quarantine was a response to that issue.

Cash told Simmer that when the pandemic shutdown started, his wife had just endured a 17-hour cancer surgery and he was ordered to leave her bedside.

Whatever shes got, I got. But I still had to go, Cash said.

Simmer said those decisions were made by the private nursing homes, hospitals and health care facilities. He said he had sympathy for decisions that had to be made quickly without much data, but he thought they were still wrong and pointed out the state didnt order anyone to take a vaccine or isolate entire facilities.

We saw the pictures of people seeing nursing home patients through a window. They should have been allowed in, Simmer said. When that didnt happen that was a mistake. That was a lesson learned from COVID.

Simmer asked lawmakers to pay attention to what actually happened during the pandemic and not just what they think happened.

If this bill is designed to address concerns about COVID, we should recognize what did and did not happen during the pandemic, Simmer said.

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South Carolina's top public health doctor warns senators wrong lessons being learned from COVID - The Associated Press

Governments in Asia and the Pacific imposed some of the strictest and longest-lasting limits on human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic, triggering a collapse in migration, stranding migrants abroad for months, and prompting mass returns that strained health and reintegration systems. But the region also kept COVID-19 cases and deaths relatively low for the first two years.

To help inform policymakers' preparations for future crises, there is a clear need to better understand the costs and benefits of this region's approach to managing the COVID-19 public-health crisis through strict travel measures.

This report is part of a series of studies by MPI's Task Force on Mobility and Borders during and after COVID-19 that explores opportunities to improve international coordination regarding border management during public-health crises. Other regional case studies in this series look at Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and South America. Thematic studies consider the role of digital health credentials in facilitating movement, the use of risk analysis to shape border policies, and the rise of remote work and "digital nomads." A final capstone policy brief reflects on lessons for crises.

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Mobility Shutdown: The Impacts of COVID-19 on Migration in Asia and the Pacific - World - ReliefWeb

New Jersey did many things right in its response to COVID-19, achieving a significantly lower death rate than many other states. Even so, the authors of a new report conclude that no amount of effort by public officials would have been enough to overcome weaknesses in health-care infrastructure and a scarcity of medical supplies.

New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy released an independent report on his states COVID-19 response on Monday. At more than 900 pages, it offers an unflinching look at the many ways that both the state and the nation were unprepared for the pandemic.

Plans existed that could have helped the state deal with such a crisis, but they werent consulted. Failures to take advantage of preparations for a public health emergency, which also hampered federal response efforts, were common, says Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO). Its a finding from New Jersey that many in public health should learn from and use, she says.

More was owed to the heroes called on to deal with the health-care crisis, the reports authors say, pointing to inadequacies in training, staffing and resources. They offer nearly 70 pages of recommendations regarding what needs to be done to fill the gap. Some of the things they heard from state agencies, key decision-makers in government and outside groups with important roles in pandemic response are surprising.

Epidemiologists had been worrying about something like COVID-19 for decades before it arrived in the U.S. Scientists began to notice that new forms of coronavirus were making humans sick in the 1960s. In 2003, the coronavirus SARS-CoV caused a global epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

That year, the World Health Organization warned that the virus was poorly understood, difficult to detect and contain, could affect caregivers and overwhelm systems of care, and cause economic loss and social unease.

A decade later, another disease caused by a coronavirus, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) reached more than 20 countries. The virus that caused it (MERS-CoV) was less contagious than SARS-CoV, but researchers continued to warn the public that a new coronavirus could cause a dangerous pandemic.

Throughout this period, popular books such as A Dancing Matrix in 1993 and The Coming Plague in 1994 attempted to raise public awareness that dangerous new pathogens would inevitably move from animals to humans.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began to spread at the end of 2019. New Jersey did have a pandemic influenza plan in place, created in 2015. It included organizational structures for such an emergency and outlined relevant factual, regulatory and legal resources. The new report describes it as extremely accurate in predicting what would eventually happen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Somehow, this work was not well-known to state leadership. In addition, investigators found, it wasnt clear who was really in charge of emergency preparedness.

Planning is neither a one-time event or the sole action needed to ensure preparedness, the authors conclude. Table-top drills and full-scale exercises can help test and refine plans, while helping those who will execute them during real emergencies gain a better understanding of how they work. The authors also call on the state to ensure new personnel are trained and recommend targeted training when there are changes in administration or leadership.

NACCHO members in New Jersey who reviewed the report would like to see particular attention to engaging local health departments in planning, Freeman notes. Circumstances vary among New Jersey's 94 local health departments.

The success of the system really relies on everybody in the system being part of the solution, Freeman says. Otherwise, you run the risk of things that you think will work not working, because they havent been fully thought through by the people that execute them.

Many of us would have loved to see a commission-type activity on the federal response to the pandemic, Freeman says. Its heartening to see this at the state level.

The Covid Crisis Group, led by Philip Zelikow, who directed the 9/11 Commission, attempted to lay the foundation for a national commission. It found there was no federal appetite for such an effort and published its findings in an investigative report, Lessons from the COVID War.

One way or another, states need to come together and agree on principles of pandemic response, says Castrucci, of the de Beaumont Foundation. COVID-19 has killed more than a million Americans. I dont know of a foreign enemy thats ever done that, Castrucci says.

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New Jersey Issues First-of-Its-Kind Report on COVID-19 Response - Governing

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Pataskala Easter Egg Hunt returns for first time since COVID-19. Here's what to know - The Newark Advocate

Today marks four years since I said the global outbreak of COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic.

My decision to use the p-word was not one I took lightly. Pandemic is a powerful word, evoking fear linked to plagues and pandemics throughout history that have claimed millions of lives and caused severe disruption to societies and economiesas COVID-19 did.

Many of WHOs critics have pointed to my use of pandemic on March 11, 2020 as evidence that WHO was late in taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously. By that stage, more than 118,000 cases had been reported in 114 countries, and more than 4,000 deaths. The horse had bolted.

However, the far more significant date was January 30, 2020, six weeks earlier, when I declared a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)the highest level of alarm under the International Health Regulations (IHR), an instrument of international law designed to govern the response to global health emergencies. At that time, fewer than 100 cases, and no deaths, had been reported outside China.

A PHEIC has legal and technical meaning; pandemic does notits a descriptor, rather than a technical designation.

I declared an end to COVID-19 as a PHEIC on May 5 of last year. Although the crisis has passed, the threat has not. The virus is still circulating, still changing, and still killing.

As countries learn to manage COVID-19 alongside other disease threats, and continue to grapple with the complications of Long COVID, they must also learn the painful lessons of COVID-19, and take corrective action to address deficiencies in the IHR and gaps in global health security that the pandemic exposed.

History teaches us that the next pandemic is not a matter of if, but when. It may be in our lifetime; it may not come for another 100 years or more. But it will come. And as things stand, the world remains unprepared.

Read More: Experts Can't Agree Whether We're Still in a Pandemic

Thats not to say nothing has been done. In the past two years, WHO, our Member States, and partners have established several initiatives to detect outbreaks earlier, strengthen sharing of biological samples and sequences, expand regional manufacturing of vaccines and other tools, improve equitable access to medical countermeasures, and strengthen financing of national preparedness and response capacities, especially in lower-income countries.

But there is still one key missing ingredient: an agreed framework between countries on how they will work together to counter the threat of a future pandemic.

The lack of coordination and cooperation between countries was one of the greatest failings of the global response to COVID-19. Countries became competitors, rather than cooperators, especially in seeking access to vaccines.

While the development of multiple safe and effective vaccines in such rapid time was an unprecedented triumph of science, before a single jab reached an arm, high-income countries had used their financial muscle to pre-order most of the worlds supplyoften ordering more than they might ever needleaving lower-income countries behind, waiting for scraps.

Of course, every sovereign government is responsible for protecting its people. But in a pandemic, no country can truly protect itself without working with other countriesespecially those with the least financial, technical, or political capitalto ensure they too are protected. A global threat demands a global coordinated response.

Countries have recognized that, which is why they decided to strengthen the IHR and, in December 2021, to develop an international agreement on pandemic preparedness and responsea legally-binding generational pact to work together to keep themselves and each other safe.

They set themselves a deadline of completing the agreement and the IHR amendments in time for adoption at the World Health Assembly in May 2024. Thats now just 10 weeks away.

Read More: Is There a 'COVID' Season Yet?

Countries are making good progress, and have agreed on significant elements of the draft agreement, although there are still some issues which require further negotiation. I remain confident they can and will find common ground.

A more pernicious problem is the avalanche of lies, fake news, and conspiracy theories about the pandemic agreement that are propagating on social and traditional media.

Just as the response to the pandemic itself was hampered by mis- and disinformation, so the agreements negotiators are operating amid a frenzy of falsehoods: That the agreement is a power grab by WHO; that it will give WHO power to impose lockdowns or vaccine mandates on countries; or that its an attack on freedom.

These claims are completely false. WHO does not have, and has never had, the power to impose anything on anyone. We dont want that power, and were not trying to get it.

The agreement is being written by countries, for countries, and will be implemented in countries in accordance with their own national laws. No country will be signing away its sovereignty to WHO. Why would it?

Legally-binding international agreements are not new. They are a tool that countries have used often since the end of the Second World War to meet common threats with a common response: the Geneva Conventions; the UN Charter; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; the Paris Agreement; the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control; and the WHO Constitution, to name a few.

All are binding agreements in international law, and none give UN staff, including me, power to dictate to sovereign states.

In his classic novel La Peste, Albert Camus wrote, There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

As the generation that lived through the COVID-19 crisis, we have a collective responsibility to protect future generations from the suffering we endured.

Because pathogens have no regard for the lines humans draw on maps, nor for the color of our politics, the size of our economies, or the strength of our militaries.

For everything that makes us different, we are one humanity, the same species, sharing the same DNA and the same planet.

We have no future but a common future.

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COVID-19 Shows Why the World Needs a Pandemic Agreement - TIME