LOS ANGELES (May 5, 2023) The World Health Organization (WHO) announced today that the COVID-19 global health emergency is over. With nearly seven million people dead and no clear answers as to the origins of the pandemic, AIDS Healthcare Foundation urges World Health Assembly Member States to adopt a new global public health convention to ensure the world does not revert to complacency on pandemic preparedness.
“The daily death toll may have subsided but the world’s woeful unpreparedness for the next, inevitable outbreak remains a dire emergency. An even bigger tragedy than losing seven million lives will be the world not learning from what went wrong with the bungled response to COVID,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein. “The emergency was declared too late because politics got in the way of public health. Evidence as to what happened at the Wuhan lab is still missing. Vaccine nationalism was a profound failure of global solidarity. We have a moral obligation to those we lost to ensure these lessons don’t go unheeded. We need nothing short of a paradigm shift in global public health based on principles of cooperation, transparency, and accountability.”