A Cri de Coeur for the Pandemic Treaty as it withers on the vine

Nina Schwalbe, who writes all the opinion pieces on why we must have this treaty, has been gifted with an academic title by Lawrence O Gostin, who runs a WHO Collaborating Center @ Georgetown U.

Nina is the principal of Spark Street Advisers, and its primary purpose seems to be publishing opinion pieces in support of the Pandemic Treaty.

She has a new piece in The Telegraph, urging the UK to support the Treaty despite the US’ pullout. Excerpts below.

Nina has a new title:

Nina Schwalbe, MPH, PhD, is a Senior Scholar at Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics and O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law and the CEO and Founder of Spark Street Advisors, a global health think tank.

She is still just a paid wordsmith for hire. Her bona fides include working for USAID, Bill Gates’ GAVI and for Soros’ Open Society.

Schwalbe is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a principal visiting fellow at the United Nations International Institute for Global Health, and an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

[Which means that Ian Lipkin probably gave her an honorary position at Columbia, just like he did for Peter Daszak, and like Lawrence Gostin gave her at Georgetown. “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” Neither academic position at Columbia or Georgetown is listed as actual employment in her 2/2025 CV.—Nass]

From her March 31 Telegraph piece on the Treaty, which is not under a paywall, for some strange reason, possibly because it is advertising:

Discord has run deep on a range of issues: from how best to design a system for low-income countries to share genomic information on pathogens and, in return, secure vaccines and gain access to technologies guarded through intellectual property, to how to address “one health” – the intersection between people, animals, and their environment.

Another point of contention is how much of the treaty can be agreed now, as binding commitments, versus carving out intractable issues to be resolved later. While last December, negotiators seemed to have a vague sense of urgency to get the agreement finalised in advance of a new, hostile US government taking the helm, it was not enough to dislodge countries from their staunch positions over the collective finish line….

The UK has similarly initiated deep cuts to its foreign aid slashing 40 per cent of the current budget – roughly £6 billion – starting in 2027. Other core health donors, including France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, appear to be following suit by stating their intent to cut back their development assistance budgets…. [Before their citizens see how their aid slush funds have been used—Nass]

This is why negotiators cannot afford to fail with just a single week in April of formal negotiations remaining. In this radical new reality, meant to demoralise, demean, and reverse the progress of decades, the pandemic treaty provides an opportunity to demonstrate that, with or without the US, there is global solidarity when it comes to global health.

Finalising the treaty text is a concrete action against the great dismantling. Existentially, it is a reaffirmation of commitment to equity, integrity, and solidarity. Practically, it is a necessity for human health. There are currently new outbreaks of a number of deadly viruses, including Marburg and Sudan-type Ebola virus, neither of which can be protected against with a vaccine that is currently available. And all it takes is one mutation of H5N1 avian influenza, already moving from animals to humans, to spark a new global pandemic against which we have no defence. [Wrong: it would take 2 simultaneous mutations or more, to make bird flu deadly and to make it transmit between human beings—Nass]…

At this point, to be a success, the treaty just needs to be good enough to help countries work together when the next pandemic hits….

The good news is that these empty phrases are unlikely to induce any nations to jump on the Pandemic Treaty bandwagon. By the end of May, the treaty will have been taken off life support and died a natural death.