After another meeting in Geneva, Dr Mary Chu pulled Joseph Musa aside. “We mustn’t appear flat-footed over these infections, Joseph.
We need a plan.”
With only a few cases, so little detail from health officials and no evidence of any links among the three widely separated countries, the usual practice was to log the cases and move on. The trouble was that the media had got wind of something during the Bangkok conference.
The spread of an even more virulent Coronavirus strain was becoming a talking point.
“It’s not like SARS where we controlled things from the start, Joseph.
This is different. It’s our reputation. Things could get of control. It’s politics, Joseph. And one of our major funders is demanding a meeting. You don’t need to ask who that is.”
Joseph didn’t ask but could guess. The WHO’s second biggest donor needed to be kept happy. “The Thailand situation could help to calm
things,” Musa suggested unconvincingly. “Not many cases, I admit, but they’ve got some virology we could use.”
“It’s what’s happened in your country, Nigeria, that worries me, Joseph,” she replied.
Musa nodded. Earlier, he’d spoken to the WHO’s regional director for Africa, Dr Pedro Lopez. Lopez had then asked a staff member to write a short statement about the Nigerian outbreak for the WHO
website. It was well hidden amongst other short notices, and Lopez soon forgot about it because his mind was on another Ebola outbreak in Guinea. When Musa called him, he was in Kinshasa answering impossible questions about the effect of climate change on a yellow fever outbreak.
Dr Pedro Lopez, like all the other regional directors, was a very busy man because the WHO no longer simply dealt with outbreaks of disease. Lopez himself had also been trying to cope with publicity that followed a TV documentary on violence against women in West Africa. Added to that were his responsibilities for improving the health of mothers, babies, and children and still dealing with all the ongoing problems surrounding HIV, AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and a hundred other problems.
Lopez was a busy man because the WHO now fed its combined wisdom not only into purely medical matters but into social issues.
Whatever the history or culture of the two hundred countries it represented, there were social standards and fixed ideologies it was now expected to implement, and those ideologies were not necessarily in keeping with the wishes of each of the nine billion humans it was to protect.
It was, though, not at all concerned by the fact that WHO had overseen the human population grow from 2.5 billion in 1948 when it was formed to around eight billion now, so perhaps, it was no great surprise that some said the WHO had become an unwieldy political organisation on a mammoth scale and was no longer fit for purpose.
Neither should it have been a surprise that there were ordinary folk like Kevin Parker out there getting as mad as hell and wanting change.
“Should I talk direct to Larry Brown in Lagos, ma’am?” Musa suggested.
“No harm. See if he can coordinate their Ministry of Health and the state government and anyone else who might know something. But don’t overdo it, Joseph. We need to keep a lid on things until it blows over.”
Musa nodded. In days gone by, things could be swept safely beneath the carpet out of sight, but nowadays, there were billions of people out there with mobile phones using social media. The entire world could go into meltdown inside twenty-four hours.