Dear Fellow World Citizen of the Year 2045, This year, in what would have been the 100th anniversary of the United Nations had it not been transformed into the United Federation of Nations just five years ago, it’s easy to see how far the world has already advanced. Last year’s outbreak of COVID-44 in a remote, mountainous region of Northern Mongolia provides a good example. Examination of the pathogen’s genome revealed that if unchecked, it would have been far more lethal than the great pandemic of 2019-21, and yet, it was locally contained and eradicated in less than two weeks with only 11 fatalities. As it turned out, the five-step plan to manage epidemics, developed decades ago by the World Health Organization, an organ of the former United Nations, was basically sound.
It was our system of global governance which prevented the plan from working effectively. But now, under a world federation, this same five-step plan worked with only minimal suffering and loss of life. The first step of the World Health Organization’s plan is Anticipation. This includes creating preparedness plans worldwide and identifying resources for treatment, labs to isolate the pathogen and sequence its genome, and facilities to manufacture vaccine.
A major problem used to be the constant underfunding of the UN in general and disease prevention in particular (Unseen Enemy, CNN Films, 2017). The elimination of war, one of the many benefits of a world federation, unburdened national governments so much that it was easy for them to pay 1-3% of their GDP to our global, democratic, federal government. As a result, each continent now has state-of-the-art WHO medical treatment and research facilities, which also serve as staging areas to move multidisciplinary teams, labs and supplies to any part of the globe. Part of the irony is that the need for them has diminished with the increased funding that has also been directed to global sanitation and health education.
The advent of a world federation also allowed for a breakthrough in the second step of the plan, the Early Detection of Outbreaks, their Assessment, and the Communication of Risk. The remote clinics in Mongolia, where patients with COVID-44 first appeared, used to report their health statistics only locally, to their provincial health departments. Now, all treatment facilities worldwide are networked to the new Global Health Monitoring System (GHMS). With the aid of artificial intelligence, medical experts at WHO faculties worldwide are able to detect an emerging disease cluster in real time, communicate directly with personnel at the clinics, and have an assessment team and full mobile lab on the ground within 36 hours.
This kind of global, rapid response was not possible under the old treaty system. It was sometimes achieved when an international airline went down, but even then, nations could be delayed access for political reasons and aircraft parts needed to be taken to distant locations for complete analysis. The GHMS also eliminates one of the main reasons the 2019 outbreak in Wuhan, China, became a global pandemic — a series of disastrous personal and/or political calculations made by the leadership of nations worldwide. Beginning with silencing of the first “whistleblower” doctor in Wuhan, a perfect storm of face-saving, protecting funding, ignoring warnings, denying science, failing to mobilize resources, placing economic interests over human life, winning elections, and bureaucracy, led to the over 200 million infections and four million deaths worldwide.
The possibility for this kind of suppression of information has been eliminated, now that raw data goes directly to the global healthcare system. The third step of the plan is Containment. Effective and rapid containment of a pathogen is vital to stop its spread. Luckily, the local clinics and regional hospital had enough capacity to quarantine those in need of ongoing medical attention, but if necessary, a mobile field hospital was deployed when the lethality of the virus was determined.
However, for a variety of reasons, it has often been difficult to have people voluntarily quarantine. A major reason is the need to continue to work and care for their families. The creators of the new global health plan anticipated this problem and built in another innovative feature, a Family Support Fund. The FSF works like a matching grant, to match the monies that local, provincial and national governments pay to the families of those in quarantine to cover their bills while they are unable to work.
This will assure that their economic life is not disrupted. Where there is no other parent to care for the children, a social worker supervisor, another part of the team, works with local agencies to temporarily place children with other family members or trusted friends who can care for them. With this degree of compassionate support, compliance with quarantines greatly increased. Other methods of containment, such as masking, hand washing, and contact tracing have similarly been followed.
Investments in increased public education, greater transparency, and material resources have all paid off. The fourth step of the plan is Control and Mitigation, which attempts to “mitigate its impact and reduce its incidence, morbidity and mortality as well as disruptions to economic, political, and social systems” (1). Before the creation of the United Federation of Nations, this step could often take months or even years, as we saw in the Great Pandemic of 2019-21. In Mongolia, we moved through this step in about a week, while therapeutics were administered, and vaccines were produced.
The final step of the WHO’s plan is Elimination, where that the disease is “no longer considered as a major public health issue,” (2) or Eradication, the permanent elimination of the disease worldwide. It’s been less than a year since we’ve seen the last case of COVID-44, but if it does remerge at another location around the globe, with the vaccine and therapeutics developed and ready, the WHO is confident it can be eliminated, this time in a matter of days. The World Health Organization’s plan for managing epidemics is but one of many solutions that have been allowed to work due to the presence of a United Federation of Nations. Humanity finally has a system of global institutions and world law capable of allowing us to manifest our highest visions.