2023-05-06 16:00:00
HEALTH – Since this Friday, May 5, 2023, “Covid-19 is no longer a health emergency of international concern” (USPPI), said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Does this mean that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic is over? Not yet, according to WHO’s pandemic surveillance and alert system, which follows international health regulations (RSI) developed in 2005, revised since May 2021 as part of the future application of the International Treaty on Pandemics.
Although the end of the USPPI may suggest an announcement to come in this direction before the summer of 2023, Mike Ryan, director of the WHO, specified that “the time has not come” and that he “there is still a threat”, in this case the emergence of yet another variant.
Omicron has changed the game
According to scientific data and medical statistics, in terms of public health and compared to other viral perils, the pandemic is however long over. The Omicron variant, which supplanted its predecessor Delta from December 2021-January 2022, changed the situation. Much less lethal, it no longer represents a health hazard, neither on a global scale, nor on the scale of any country.
In France, from May 2022, the INSERM Sentinelles bulletins, which are based on data collected by general medicine, indicate an incidence rate of cases of acute respiratory infection (ARI) seen in consultation at 63 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
Not only is it dangerous to speak below 150 cases per 100,000 inhabitants of an active epidemic within a population, but this figure (from May 23 to 29, 2022) then takes into account all the viruses that can be the cause of a respiratory infection. The share of Sars-CoV-2 within ARI then only decreases from week to week. A general trend which was observed, during the same period, in all countries of the world.
A declaration of a pandemic too late?
On January 30, 2020, Tedros A. Ghebreysus announces to the world the start of a period of 3 years and 3 months under USPPI, based on data provided by a status report. The declaration of a pandemic was made on March 11, 2020. Some observers thought at the time that this was too late.
In fact, its declaration is as rapid as during the last pandemic to date, in 2009, because of the H1N1 virus, responsible for the influenza A disease. At the time, naming a pandemic and declaring it is not not so easy.
According to the text of the regulations in force and the accompanying definitions, a “high number” death of patients must be recorded in “several Member States” of the WHO. This was not then the case for influenza A, which developed in Mexico (although the patient-zero was from California) and which fortunately remained not very lethal.
But it was without counting on the WHO, which proceeded in May 2009 to a modification of the definitions. Thus, finished the obligation to count “a high number” of deaths linked to a new virus causing an epidemic: according to the texts, a “increased and sustained transmission” within “two out of six regional areas” enough to name the presence of a pandemic.
This allows the WHO, on June 11, 2009, to declare the maximum alert for influenza A. The pandemic vigilance plan then reaches the ultimate “level 6” (a codification that disappeared in May 2021). This information is widely relayed, in unison, by the mainstream media which have followed all WHO communications without really reading and remotely verifying the data and scientific studies published.
For example, the vague counting of deaths in Mexico at the start of the crisis, erroneous, was finally revised downwards by the health authorities and the WHO, who nevertheless focused all their communication, particularly anxiety-provoking, on these “inflated” balance sheets.
Above all, this announcement of a “pandemic” mechanically places the Member States of the WHO in battle order, ready to order anti-viral drugs and vaccines. Without this step, commercially and legally, this is not possible.
A decision made on projections?
In 2020, with a timing similar, the sequence of events was reproduced in a comparable way. On January 30, there are still no deaths from Covid in “high number”. And if 82 cases are identified according to the WHO in 18 countries, mainly in Asia, all the countries of the world then continue to treat respiratory infections as medical practice recommends.
The first case of Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus outside China was detected in Thailand on January 13, 2020. It then follows the path from Hong Kong to Italy on January 28. On March 6, 2020, the balance sheet in Italy totaled 197 dead and 4636 contaminations. On March 11, France totaled 2,281 cases and 48 deaths. These figures suffered at that time from a lack of analysis and hindsight, but were announced to the public daily, in heavy rotation.
On March 16, the controversial British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson and his team publish a document indicating that in the absence of measures to curb the spread of the epidemic, the virus is likely to cause “510,000 dead in the UK” et “more than 2.2 million in the United States”.
Despite his multiple errors in terms of alarmist predictions for years about the management of health crises, Ferguson remains listened to by those in power. He meets Emmanuel Macron on March 12 to tell him, in an anxiety-provoking way and based on a very questionable methodology based on an old mathematical algorithm, the risk of half a million deaths. “if nothing is done”.
While the WHO announced the day before, on March 11, the state of a pandemic, the French executive did something: on March 17, 2020, France experienced its first confinement.
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