 So good evening, everyone. Welcome to this director's lecture series. It's really wonderful to have all of you here. Thank you very much for coming. It's really wonderful to start having people in person attending these events. For about 18 months we did this online and we're now moving to what we call blended or hybrid delivery of these events and it's really lovely to see people and to have the opportunity to engage directly. My name is Adam Habib and I am the director of SOAS at the University of London. I also have here as our special guest tonight Angela Cain who is the senior advisor to the Nuclear Threat Initiative and of course I'm really delighted Angela that you took the opportunity to come here in person. We also have Dr Wilma James, senior research scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University who joins us from New York City. He really stood in at the last minute for Dr Maruta from the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who unfortunately can't be with us tonight because he's ill. I wish Dr Maruta a speedy recovery but I want to thank Wilma for stepping in and in the last minute. Thank you very very much Wilma for this. For tonight's event we will be focusing on gaps in biosecurity and it often says that we have to have a personal crisis to reveal one's true self and it seems to me that it's as true for societies in our world. We've just come from the COVID-19 pandemic. We're just emerging from this pandemic and this pandemic found the world wanting in many many ways. In the UK there was quite a disconnect between what the scientists were advocating for and how we intervene and how government responded. For much of this period I was in South Africa and similarly in South Africa there was quite a tension between what government was doing in that case and what scientists wanted. The government responded very quickly in rhetorical terms to what scientists were saying but the level of execution was found wanting and that had quite a dramatic impact on the pandemic and how it played out. Also for instance in the South African case when South Africa declared that they had found a variant, the Omicron variant, the response of particularly the developer was inappropriate. Britain imposed a ban, a travel ban. It was argued that the travel ban was there to prevent the variant from spreading even though it was known that it had already penetrated multiple borders. And even after that the ban wasn't lifted. In fact it was extended on African countries and yet not extended on European or North America. And that sent a really powerful signal to the world. We had criticized China for not acting timeously. But yet when a country like South Africa had acted timeously the world's response was to penalize it rather than to react to it. So that to react appropriately to it. And so the world was seriously found wanting in the way we responded to the virus and to the reactions to the virus from the developing world. There was also the fact that we had vaccines that rolled out in profoundly unequal ways. We know that the developed world was hoarding vaccines. Even the World Health Organization was saying that this vaccine nationalism will come to hurt all of us and it would not allow us to deal effectively with the virus across the world. And so there's some serious questions that have to be asked about how the world responded to this virus to COVID-19 and whether we are prepared to deal with this as we go forward. In a recent article Angela suggested that we really need to bolster our capabilities of the UN to investigate the origins of high consequence biological events. I mean the big question and the big debate that was here around COVID-19 is was it a lab accident? Was it actually artificially created in a laboratory? And there was that debate that played out. I don't necessarily want to focus on that debate around COVID-19, but I do want to focus tonight on is there a possibility of a lab accident around a new pandemic? Could there be a biological attack that inspires and enables a new pandemic? Or could it be of natural causes? And is the world appropriately positioned to respond to that? Would we be able to figure out and identify the origin of such a virus where to hit us? That's the fundamental question that we are going to pose today. And Angela has said that she believes that we should have a joint assessment mechanism in the UN Secretary General's office. I'd like to come back to that when she makes her remarks and when we when we deliberate on this. Let me quickly recap the brief CVs I have of Angela and Walmot. Angela served as the Nuclear Threat Initiative Sam Nunn Distinguished Fellow between 2021 and 2022, supporting the NTI's work on global threat reduction. Her particular focus is on the NTI's bio initiatives to reduce global catastrophic biological risks by strengthening international coordination and preventing and responding to the devastating events. She spent 35 years working for the United Nations, both in New York and in the field. She has been Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs, Under Secretary General for Management and High Representative for Disarmament. Prior to taking up the fellowship, she resided in Vienna and was Vice President of the International Institute for Peace in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation. Walmot, who is based in Colombia, is Honorary Professor of Public Health at the University of Vartistrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He conducts research on pandemic response and biosecurity, convenes high level meetings on planetary threats, leads the Center for Pandemic Research in the College of Arts and Sciences at Columbia. He convenes the Schmidt Futures Supported Columbia for Vartistrand, Vaccine Safety and Confidence Building Working Group and his Deputy Chair to the Wellcome Trust, Sir Jeremy Farah, of the Vaccine Task Team, supporting African governments in sustainable vaccine manufacturing. Wilmot serves as a senior consultant in biosecurity to the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative as a consultant to the African Center for Disease Control and his co-chair of the National Framework Sub-Working Group of the G7-led Global Partnership Signature Initiative to mitigate biological threats in Africa. He was previously a member of parliament and an opposition spokesperson on health, trade and industry schools in higher education in South Africa. We will open tonight's discussion with a short video message from Rajat Khosla, Director of the UNU, United Nations Universities International Institute on Global Health, introducing what biosecurity is and providing a perspective from the Asia Pacific on the challenges in the field. And then following this short presentation, we will go with an introductory set of cabinets from Angela at the Wilmot, and then I will open up the discussion with all of you. Thank you and I hope you enjoyed tonight's event. Can I ask for the video to be played? Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to share some thoughts with you today as part of the discussion on biosecurity. At the outset, colleagues, I would like to thank Professor Adam Habib for inviting me to this very important dialogue. My name is Rajat Khosla. I work as the director of the UN think tank on global health based here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Colleagues, the World Health Organization defines global public health security as activities both proactive and reactive to minimize the danger and impact of acute public health events that endanger people's health across geographical regions and international boundaries. It includes deliberate and accidental biological threats, risk management related to advanced life sciences, research and other biosecurity issues and reduction of global catastrophic biological risks. These risks are posed by biological agents which could lead to sudden extraordinary widespread disaster beyond the collective capability of individual governments or private sector to control. As you can imagine, therefore, if unchecked, these could lead to great suffering, loss of life and damages related to economies, societal stability and regional or global security more broadly. The COVID-19 pandemic is a great reminder as it underscores the importance of health security and also urgent need for initiatives to foster pathways for international health security research and development of administrative and policy agendas. This is particularly true in context of the Asia Pacific region as the attention to biosecurity has thus far been rather limited and ad hoc. There is both a need but also an opportunity to enhance advanced health security policies, programs and practices across Asia to reduce the risk of consequential biological threats and risk. In a recent regional dialogue, participants discussed the value of international and regional collaboration on biosecurity and health security issues. Friends discussed a variety of international partnerships including bioservilance networks, training and educational programs and preparedness and response coordination to connect the disparate efforts and advanced preparedness for deliberate as well as natural and accidental biological threats. Friends, colleagues, the time to act is now to be effective. We need to ensure collaboration, cooperation and partnership across the region and globally. I'm very much looking forward to the outcomes of your discussion to help inform these discussions, not only within the Asia Pacific context but also more globally. Thank you. Angela, can I ask you to take the floor? We're getting light. Thank you very much. Thank you to Director Adam Habib and so as for inviting me here tonight and talking to you about an initiative that I very strongly believe in. And I think we've heard a little bit of a doom and gloom how bad it's all been and of course all of that is correct. I will tell you with regard to the vaccines I've spent the first year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vienna and we couldn't get vaccines if we even tried. It was very, very delayed so we had also initially, I must stress initially, we had quite a bit of problem getting vaccinated and basically being able to at least withstand some of the onslaughts of the pandemic. Now let me, you've already talked about it, Adam, a little bit about the bio risk landscape and I appreciate that because the last two and a half years have really been very enlightening as far as all of us are concerned as to what can actually happen. I mean if you think about it, over six million people lost their lives, over 525 million people were infected. Those are huge numbers. We don't think about this all the time and maybe the death toll and the people who were infected and infected have gone down somewhat but it's still with us. It's not gone. And we've talked already about the significant economic disruption we've heard about, trillions of dollars lost. I mean who can actually calculate all of this? It's going to be very, very difficult to come out of this whole sort of see how can we actually do it. And what it has shown, and you have mentioned that already Adam, is that national governments but also international agencies, international multilateral institutions were totally and woefully unprepared to respond to pandemics. And that really underscores our joint, our common vulnerability to events of this catastrophic outcome. And if we had had some stronger biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, the world still remains unprepared for such events. And COVID of course is not the first pandemic we've had. Everyone has always been talking about this flu epidemic of 1918. I mean that was a fantastic event but once in a hundred years. But have we had more events lately? Yes, I mean you've seen that. We've had multiple naturally occurring biological events. There was a 2003 SARS outbreak in Asia. You had a 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak and then you had an Ebola outbreak in Africa. Now we have to be prepared that there is more of this coming about. And so what we've also seen, it's been mentioned, it's global travel, trade, environmental degradation, all of this can fuel infectious disease, infectious disease threats. And that is also because we need to be mindful not only of the globally and naturally occurring diseases, but we also need to be mindful of a possible human cost pandemics. And we have rapid bioscience and biotechnology advances all over the world. It's not only the north, there's a lot of it in the south as well. And they have extraordinary potential benefits. They can improve public health, they can advance economic development, they can guard against climate change. But they also pose unique risks and that have to be mindful of. Because the tools of modern bioscience and technology which could cause a global pandemic, they could be having consequences as severe as the COVID-19 pandemic or potentially much more. So we need to look at a longer term view. And frankly, I'm going to present to you a proposal because the organization that I'm working with, Civil Society in the US right now, is looking at what can we do to actually help. What is the solution? What can we come up with? We don't only want to complain all the time, but we want to think about what can be done. And the recent challenge is really to have the biological risks that the world faces. And let me just recall one aspect and I think we tend to forget that. When COVID-19 was declared in March of 2020, there was no mechanism that existed to trigger an investigation or let's say an assessment of this event. Instead, three months later, the World Health Organization called for a comprehensive, independent and impartial study. And that was a call that was supported by 122 countries. But it meant it had to go through a deliberate mechanism first to sort of get all the countries in WHO to agree to this. And I think that what is difficult is if you go through a consultative process in a multilateral organization, it takes a lot of time and you have to get a lot of countries to agree to this before you can actually go ahead. So that took time. And if there had been another possibility of having a nimble, credible evidence-based mechanism in place that the international community had already agreed on, it would have been much faster. It could have been deployed much faster and therefore they could have been on the ground much faster to gain valuable information that would have been able to possibly prevent more damage or possibly a spillover. And so closing this gap would greatly increase the international community's ability to effectively prevent and respond to the next biological catastrophe. So what we need is really a mechanism that discerns the basic facts about the origins of high consequence biological events. And that's the question, how do we achieve that goal? And what we have come up with, and that's the proposal that I want to talk to you about, is really enhance the capabilities of the UN system to investigate pandemic origins. It doesn't matter whether they're naturally occurring, whether they're accidental or whether they are, God forbid, deliberate. Because right now there's a gap. There's a gap in these capabilities. We're not able to investigate the source of biological events of unknown origin. And they fall at the seam between something that is existing already as a mechanism naturally occurring, that would be the World Health Organization. Or you have another mechanism that exists in the United Nations that was established 35 years ago. And that is basically a mechanism to investigate alleged use of chemical and biological weapons. And that has the authority to investigate deliberate bio weapons use. It was used in Syria, if you will recall it, and that was in 2013. And in fact, I was the one who was responsible for the investigation in Syria of the chemical weapons use, the outbreak in Haute in particular. But it's never been used in all of this time for biological weapons threat. There hasn't been any allegation. There has to be an allegation from a country for it to spring into action. And so far it has never been used for that person. And because of COVID-19, you had unknown origins. The SGM, as they call it, the Secretary-General's mechanism couldn't spring into action because it wasn't a deliberate use. We didn't know what it was. So it went automatically to WHO. And WHO has made tremendous efforts also due to COVID-19 to basically increase its capabilities to address outbreaks of uncertain origin. They have created a body that is called the Scientific Advisory Group for the origins of novel pathogens. And I think it's very important, but still the gap remains. It's just not there. So what's the solution? The solution that we've come up with is the joint assessment mechanism, we call it, the GEM, to determine the source of high-consequence biological events of unknown origin. And that is exactly what I'm saying. It would address cases where it is unknown what it is. You just don't know. But it would be a small unit, and we would propose to place it in the office of the Secretary-General. Now, why the office of the Secretary-General? The Secretary-General, of course, is the head guy of all of the UN system. And so that means that if he has it in his office, he can basically say, there is an outbreak. I'd like you to go and assess this outbreak. And he can talk to Edward Ucho and say, if you want your people to help support this, you can say to the Secretary-General's mechanism, which has also trained people in technical capabilities to say, we want you to come in. So he basically can direct the various parts of the system to say, you know, this is something that we need to do, because you need to bring something that is transparent, there cannot be any misinformation around it, and you need to have it quickly done. And that is, of course, a very political assessment. It's basically that, you know, the UN is always ruled by its member states. But the Secretary-General has the authority to act on his own, and that makes it a lot more nimble, that makes it very quick, and that basically also removes it from any potential interference from, let's say, Security Council, and we've all heard about how difficult the geopolitical situation is right now, what is happening in the Security Council. Even in the General Assembly, we just had a resolution that was adopted two days ago on the referendum in the Ukraine, and basically you had 143 states which voted in favor of that. You had five states that voted against it, but you also had a large number of 35 states who abstained from it. So that also tells you that the multilateral community member states of the UN are not always in agreement on all of this thing. And one of the difficulties that we also see is that if there is a deployable unit that is very, very quick, it cannot have false information, it cannot spread false information, and that is something you come out, people trust basically the information that comes out of the United Nations, and that I think is very good. Now, there's been a lot of work being done with this with partners, working groups, and so I think that that was extremely important and that is continuing. But I also want to mention that the Secretary General issued a report that I'm sure that you've heard about it in 2021 in response to a call from the General Assembly, and he issued a report called Our Common Agenda. And if you read the report, all of it is about what is the future of the world, what can we do against pandemics, what can we do to safeguard ourselves, and what can we do to prevent crises from happening, pandemic outbreaks from happening. So this fits very well into what he wants to do in his last mandate. He's still got four years and a bit to go, and I'm hoping that the ideas that he's coming up with will actually be implemented. There's a bit of a longer process as it always is with member states and political discussions, but on the other hand I think this will come to fruition in the next year, year and a half. Now, basically what member states are seeing is that the pandemic has really strengthened our resolve to do something about this. And I would see this joint assessment mechanism essentially as an insurance policy. It's an insurance policy that sits there, maybe it will never be used, hopefully it will never be used, but on the other hand all states can benefit from it. You can find out the source of an outbreak quickly and it has the benefit of possibly preventing the spread beyond borders to other countries. It can identify solutions to contain the outbreak and it can find countermeasures to treatment rapidly and possibly identify solutions to prevent a recurrence. And states in the south have very good biological capabilities, but maybe not enough to address a complex crisis quickly. And so having a mechanism that can come to their assistance with you and credentials with the power to mobilize action I think would be a very important tool. And I think that after all we all live in this world, you know, problems are transboundary, they don't stop anywhere. So we need to basically address the possibilities that we have and find solutions to the problems that we're currently dealing with. Thank you very much. I'm going to shift to Wilmot. Wilmot, the floor is yours. Thank you very much and thank you again for inviting me to participate in this really important event. And I'm very pleased to be able to at least virtually see you Adam. And also Angela was a Coast colleague of mine working at the nuclear threat initiatives. So to start with just a definition or two, biosecurity refers to essentially keeping pathogens in safe hands, which means keeping it in the laboratory, especially biosafety level three and four laboratories, keep it safe when it's being transported, and finally make biological weapons obsolete. I'll put it as bold as that. So that's what biosecurity is about. It's essentially keeping pathogens in safe hands and in a case of biological weapons making them in a long and a short term project obsolete. Biosafety is protect health workers and people from being infected. So let me just say that to start off with that what is being proposed here by Angela with a joint assessment mechanism is a rapid capability to identify the source origins and causes of an outbreak of a pathogen of unknown architecture. And the reason why that's fundamentally important is that the faster you can do that, the faster you can act and the faster you can act, the faster you can save lives. This is all about preventing death. This is all about saving lives and having a mechanism like that is a key part of how we act. And the reason why it is so crucial at this time in our history is that we have known about the need to act quickly for the last 30 years and we haven't developed a mechanism to do that. So Rebecca Katz at Georgetown University started a project called the YAL Security Net where they created the portal library of every commission report, every blue ribbon report, every assessment over the last 25 years. Scarlet what's in there and in each case the recommendation is made that the world needs a mechanism to respond and it hasn't been able to do that. So it's been recognized for 25 years that this is a major gap, it's the inability to actually act very quickly. There is no global response mechanism and what is proposed finally is one. So what are the resources that we have when it comes to early detection? We have something called the Global Viral Project which is led by Dennis Carroll, which is a collaborative science initiative to discover zoonotic viral threats and to stop future pandemics. We have this extraordinary asset that's being accumulated where there's a library being built around what's known as zoonotic viral threats, so rooted in the animal kingdom. So we have that as the resource that's ongoing. The second resource is a project developed by Resolve to Save Lives which is led by Tom Frieden where they develop a metric called 717 that is to say all countries must work towards building a series of capabilities to meet those three numbers. Seven days to detect an outbreak, one day to communicate it and seven days to respond. Those are sharp numbers. We did not respond to, we didn't recognize COVID-19 in seven days. We certainly did not communicate that in one day and our response is still ongoing. So all countries must work towards it and yeah colleagues, it's a really important thing to notice that we have developed the technologies to speed up this process and let me list them. These are all the new technologies that can be used as accelerators that the world can use. Antigen and enzyme immune assays and PCR tests are now standard. We have surveillance capabilities for remote and resource limited regions such as drone delays to deliver medical supplies and biological samples. We have field deployable equipment like Minion, the Minion sequencer and the Starlink satellite internet to enable remote lab work with real-time data sharing. We have extremely advanced diagnostic platforms such as CRISPR, the diagnostics which can now be optimized for what's called massively multiplexed analysis. These are tests that can be done for hundreds or thousands of pathogens simultaneously in a single sample. It's quite amazing. We have next generation genetic sequencing tools in national and regional laboratories as standard used now. Tools in what's known as metagenomic sequencing which is a broad spectrum technique that detects RNA and RNA fragments in any given sample and the returns precise genetic profiles. We are able to link all of that into digital surveillance networks where we can take real-time data as a basis for creating a basis for refined interventions. It was once said that we are capable of stopping pandemics. We have the technology, what we require is the world and what we require are the instruments to respond. Many individual countries have adopted these technologies but there is still no global rapid response mechanism to deal with pandemics with outbreaks on a pandemic scale. So here we have these assets, we have the signs, we have an accumulated knowledge base on which to calibrate interventions in a really refined and effective way but we lack a global mechanism. We have as Angela pointed out the WHO in terms of World Health which is essentially a public health technical agency but some capacity to respond in a very limited way. We have, let us not forget UNICEF when it comes to children, what we lack and we also have the biological weapons convention which is about compliance to the rules of dealing with biological weapons. What we lack is a point of intervention and that is what is being proposed so all by way of saying just to affirm the fundamental importance of doing this. Now what are the desired characteristics of a mechanism like this? And it's an observation on my part but also a point of discussion regarding the jam, the joint assessment mechanism. First the one desired characteristic is it must have incontrovertible science-based credibility. There is fundamental importance, that is what we, when we speak about lab leaks for example, we better get the science right on that. There has been a lot of speculation around that and in my view highly irresponsible speculation about lab leaks. What you require is incontrovertible science-based credibility in order to get countries and the science communities to cooperate. Secondly it must be lodged in an institution with global moral authority and the United Nations has that. It represents all of its member states, it has moral authority, it has the right to intervene in terms of certain principles and countries, individual member states have to play by those rules. So secondly and thirdly and this is far more tricky, it has to be insulated from global politics. It has to be shielded from global politics. It's not separate from global politics and there's a political side to this but it must be shielded from the day-to-day cut and thrust of global politics. And there lies a challenge. How do you do that? I think you do that by pilot testing a few things and there's a way of doing it. So in conclusion to say we have the assets, we have the experience, we have the technology, we have to act, we've been saying this for many years, years of opportunity. COVID-19 has revealed to those of us doubtful about the fundamental importance of doing this. There are natural outbreaks, there are accidental outbreaks and there are derivative causements. And we have the means to mitigate those and prevent those if we act. So what's being proposed is a jam. I give it my full support. I think it's a fabulous idea. There's a lot, a few things to work out that's important. We need to speak about how much this will cost and it will pay for it and so on. But to say that those three principles are important in establishing it. Inconservable science and institutional model authority insulated and shielded from global politics. And with that, thank you very much. Thank you Wilmot. So colleagues, thank you to Angela, thank you to Wilmot. I think that they both stuck to time. They summarized very beautifully what the big challenge is and what is a potential mechanism and a solution. And I want to open up the conversation. As I understand it, what we are talking about is the real threat of pathogens of unknown origin. If that were to emerge again, we need a capacity to very quickly identify the origin of it, how to act to address it and how to put the mechanisms in place in that regard. I am going to enable a conversation. I'm going to move between the audience here in the hall and then online. And I'm going to be assisted with colleagues in that regard. But I want to kick off and I really have a two-part question for Angela and Wilmot and I want to get their thoughts on this. It's implicit in what they said. But I do want to pose the question bluntly. If the world were confronted with the pathogen of unknown origin a month from now or six months from now, is the world in any better place to deal with it than we were three years ago when we confronted the pandemic threat? So that's the first big question I want to pose. And I'll come to both Angela and Wilmot. The second, in many ways, the proposal that has been recommended or the solution that's being recommended is a joint assessment mechanism. And I can't imagine anyone saying that we don't need a mechanism to intervene quickly. The real challenge about the UN has been can you enable the political will to intervene across the politics of national countries? And I recall when the World Health Organization sent a team, a scientific team into China to think through and work through the COVID-19 virus challenge and how to, what had happened, what are the threats, etc. There was, that visit became incredibly politicized very, very quickly and there were even questions about whether the director general of the World Health Organization would survive in his post given how quickly that visit had become politicized. So I wonder, even if we resolve the mechanism question which both of you are supportive of, how do we insulate it from the kind of thrust of global politics as Wilmot suggested? And is there any thought process in that regard that we can suggest other than simply locating it in the secretary general's office? Is there anything else that we can do to insulate it and what would that involve? So I put those as two questions. I'm going to come back to you, Angela, to respond to that. I'll come back to Wilmot and then I'll loop back to the audience. Okay, it works. Thank you very much, Adam. Let me leave it up to you to put the brutal questions right at the beginning. But anyway, thank you Wilmot. I'm so sorry I forgot to greet you first when I started speaking so I'm delighted to be paired with you. So two questions. Let me tackle the first one and that is basically the pathogen of unknown origin. There's an outbreak six months from now, a year from now. Will we be better prepared? Would the world be better prepared? My opinion is yes, we would be. And you know why? Because we've suffered tremendously for the last two and a half years so we've realized how quickly this can go out of hand and that we must do something very, very rapidly to address it and to sort of see that doesn't further spread and to protect the people who can be very easily affected by the outbreak of such a pathogen. I'm frankly very, very impressed with the rapidity with which vaccines were developed. I mean, if you think about that, you know, how long does it take normally to develop vaccines? And I think this has given us the confidence that actually you have a pathogen of unknown origin. You decide what it is, you find out what it is. You have a lot of technological advancement these days in biological science in particular which will rapidly help us to identify it and then to address and find a solution for it. And I think yes, we would be better off because of this very unfortunate situation that we've gone through but also because we've realized how costly it is. Not only in terms of loss of life, people sick but also in terms of the economic losses that we've gone through and basically this is something that is affecting us all and that will affect us for quite some time. So that is my answer to the question that's pretty unequivocal how I feel about that. Now the real challenge for the UN and you mentioned the geopolitical situation and the challenges that really arise in the situation where countries don't see eye to eye anymore that there are factions developing and that there are very strong disagreements and divisions developing in the international community, that is a problem. And I think that problem is not going to go away anytime soon. It won't be in six months, it won't be in a year. I think we're in a situation where everything that we have known and this sense of security that we've had for decades has so quickly unraveled that it's really taken us by surprise. And this comes on top of the COVID insecurity that we've gone through. So that is a very real threat. Our answer to that was to, and I alluded to that in terms of putting under the Secretary General who has the authority under the charter, there is an article that is called Article 99. And Article 99 gives him the unique authority to actually act on his own accord. He doesn't need to consult with any member state. He can do it on his own. It's a warning. It's been very rarely used practically not at all. I think it was Doug Hummerscheld who used it at one point. But it is not really a provision in the charter that has been very often exercised. There's not been exercised in the last decades. Why? Because the Secretary General also wants to be sure that he doesn't go against the major powers. And that means, yes, the P5 in the Security Council, but also other powerful, economically powerful countries that he doesn't want to confront with a policy that he knows or he's aware that they won't agree with. But what this is supposed to do, and we're taking out very conscientiously out of the political context, the JAM, the Joint Assessment Mechanism, is a small unit, maybe four to six people. And they're scientists. And it is a science-based mechanism. And that means that the science, if you have the facts, it's always very hard to counter facts. If you have the facts and you can prove that this is the way forward, then it's very, very hard to go against that. Because how do you counter that? Maybe my misinformation, maybe by distorting the evidence. But facts, in my opinion, always win the day. And this is something where I think the Secretary General has the authority to deploy a team. And that team is not subject, or the deployment is not subject to approval by the Security Council, by the member states. He can do it on his own account. But it ends time. That is basically something you mentioned, the World Health Organization, and the team that they deployed two, three months afterwards. But it had to go through an approval process by the member states before that team could even be deployed. And then there was a lot of wrangling about who would be the members. The members were not all scientists, right? I mean, there were also political appointees on it. And that's part of the problem. If you make it a technical science-based effort that can dispose off or send out deploy, then I think you have a much better chance to get to the truth of the matter, to get to the facts. And you present the facts. And that's when you try to start finding solutions. Okay. I agree with Angela that we are better prepared when it comes to science and technology in terms of mounting an effective response, a far more effective response than when the next epidemic and pandemic hits us. I agree entirely with that. And vaccine development using mRNA platforms is an illustration of that capability. But I don't think we'd be prepared at all when it comes to public sentiment and to our broader political terrain. There's been a breakdown in trust. We've seen a rise of populism. We've seen a breakdown in trust in the part of society and political leaders. We've seen major setbacks by politicians, especially in federations such as in the US with regards to Donald Trump's role and Bolsonaro in Brazil setting back what ought to be greater trust in the capability of modern science to intervene through the anti-vaxxal movement. And so there's been a break. On the political level and on the social level. And there's the project. It's very interesting how much research money is going into health and to science and how little is going into the social sciences and into the humanities. And that's where the problem lies. We don't understand enough about what trust means. We don't know enough about how to build trust. We don't understand enough about the social psychology or vaccine hesitancy and so on. We don't have the investment in the social science of how to build trust looking into the future. So that's my first response. My second response on the question of shielding a response device as Angela's outline is that we need to develop a new discipline called health diplomacy where we can actually introduce into the political world a new generation of experts trained in health who serve as health diplomats. And so part of the modern diplomacy is not just about trade. It's not just about defense. It's not just about promoting your country's arts and culture globally but it's to negotiate the health imperatives of the world as a specialized discipline. Universities should introduce in my view a career path in health diplomacy in order to advance this. It requires a mastery of complicated science but what you require are the political tools to negotiate. You must remember during the west of the Cold War Soviet scientists and American scientists always communicated when it came to dealing with existential threats. They always communicated. There was a line of communication. That line does not exist today but that's the scientist involved when it comes to the nucleoside that's really important across the board and it comes to existential threats. I mean the Soviet Union and the United States collaborated in an extraordinary way and it came to developing a vaccine against polio and to roll it out. It was jointly done by both countries. So we can't reverse history but we can build a new platform for the world. It's very, very difficult. The question you asked about the ability of a global organization like WHO which has global model authority to intervene in a country against its wishes I think is a tough thing especially in this world of rising nationalism again. But I think we need to work hard and very systematically to build a new kind of a new politics of dealing with this through a formalized program of promoting a new area when it comes to how we conduct foreign affairs. Every country must have a health diplomat in its embassy and there has to be a career track which universities should embrace in order to generate a well connected, globally connected network of health diplomats. Thank you. Thank you very much. I see our executives taking notes on that one and thinking about a new curriculum strategy. I'm going to open up for questions. I have one or two but I'm going to open up now. Let me see I think I've seen Laura. Is there anybody else in the audience? So I'm going to start with Laura and then I'm going to go there and then I'll come to the online. Can I suggest Angela and Walmart? Can you just note the questions? I'll go in rounds of three and then I'll come back to you to take it through. So Laura. Thank you. I'm Laura Hammond. I'm a pro director for research and knowledge exchange here at SOAS. My question actually you started to touch on it Willman actually in your last remarks around the importance of social sciences in helping to tackle and helping to build trust as you were saying but I think also if we reflect back on the Ebola pandemic prior to the COVID outbreak the public COVID pandemic we can see that the important role that social sciences played in not just delivery of public health messages but actually in understanding the behavior of the diseases in that instance and so I would invite both of you to say something perhaps about how you see social scientists engaging more with the work of this proposed commission and more broadly in terms of countering pandemics. I was working with UK research and innovation in the early days of the pandemic and we saw huge amounts of research funding going out the door for natural sciences for medical research absolutely understandable but much less in the way of social sciences which was a real missed opportunity at the early stages so maybe it would be great to hear some more of that. Thank you. There was a stick in your hand. Thank you and thank you Angela and Wilmot. Jerry Smith I've got a question a bit more technical and tactical with the jam do you envisage the jam having a surveillance capability as well or is it just on the is it going to be kind of a responsive mechanism and if so how would you foresee that kind of trigger happening how would that trigger operate for the jam to essentially to deploy Is there any questions online? Yeah there's a couple online so one that I think I might link to the social sciences is how can the massive proliferation of disinformation effectively be combative in terms of when a next pandemic does hit there will be a politicisation of health responses how do we combat that in terms of disinformation campaigns making it more difficult to get populations or governments to listen Before I come back to Wilmot I'm going to start with Wilmot what struck me about the Ebola pandemic in West Africa is we knew from very early on what the clinical intervention should be because Ebola had been something that had impacted the African continent on multiple occasions what struck me about the West African Ebola pandemic is how we needed a social intervention partly because so much of those societies where Islamic societies and the burial practices given the fact that they washed the body etc enabled if you like the spread of the Ebola virus what you needed was a social science intervention in fact what you needed was the interventions of religious leaders in that kind of context and it took us a while to pick this up and had we been more contextually grounded and more multidisciplinary aware we would have been able to pick that up further and so I just wanted to loop back on when we're thinking about the multi this initiative is there any way that we're thinking about a diversity of scientific skills that allow for that? Let me come back to Wilmot and then to you Angela Wilmot? Just to focus on the proposal that Angela made around the jam and the questions that have emerged so the jam would be an investigative body each will be made up Angela can say more about this highly trained scientists use the tools of modern science to determine what's known as ecology that is the cause of an outbreak and so what it requires is access to do the work just to speak in terms of that particular primary goal it needs access it needs access to the country it needs access to the scientists it needs access to sites and so on and so forth and cooperation that's required so that's really the link between the science the investigation and the social world but how you respond to that in order to act on the discovery that is once it's been determined governments need to act the WOE needs to act and other agencies need to act once a course of action is chosen then you're dealing with a great variety of diversity when it comes to culture as you know society and social architecture between countries and within countries and how you calibrated intervention has to be sensitive as you point out Adam to an acute understanding of cultural and social practices of society and the people who study that sociologists, political scientists anthropologists, social psychologists and so on so the social science component is vital to the success of any intervention because either you can get a barrier or you can be eased into those environments in ways that are effective so that's my response to the first question the second question about surveillance mechanism I'm going to refer to Angela to explain but to say that from our end and the world of science the surveillance mechanisms that are being built presently should not be duplicated at all and there should be a harness to serve the general's purpose but she can speak more about that that's her specialty around the issue of disinformation that we require a whole seminar to deal with that it's a fundamentally important thing to deal with especially in the world of social media and it's very tough all I would say is people who are invested in the disinformation it's very difficult to change their minds, the wisdom around everywhere when it comes to vaccines is that you can't rebut the anti-vaxxers because they're better in their position and what you have to deal with is actually the majority of the population who just want more information especially information about the safety of intervention so that's where you need to deal with the counter disinformation strategy are the wait-and-see population that are uncertain people, they're not hostile all they want is more information and it's our job, we've not done a good job on this to communicate effectively we must learn to communicate effectively to where people are and not to where we think they should be so over to you, Angela thank you Wilma let me say a little bit more about the social sciences approach thank you Laura for that question because I think you were absolutely spot on and that's something where we haven't seen enough action frankly I think that what is revealed also is like how are people's attitudes to exact scenes all of a sudden we all needed to be vaccinated and then it was like you couldn't get into a restaurant if they were open in any case without a vaccination certificate how about masks we see a tremendous resistance still against masks you go to other countries like Japan they wear masks all the time even if they're a little cold even before Covid and I think those are attitudes that need to be studied because they will help us deal with the next with the next pandemic if and hopefully it doesn't but if it happens I think those are extremely important inputs we've had a toolbox for so many decades that has served as well and all of a sudden we're finding that it doesn't serve us well anymore we need new approaches we need new tools we need to find out what actually motivates us so I think this is a really really good question that I feel needs to have attention and it isn't percolated yet maybe it's like a little bit on the lower scale but it needs to be brought up higher and the surveillance question thank you for that, I think it was Jerry who asked that for that it's a very very good question now surveillance when you look at the word it has a really kind of a sinister connotation it means something you know, not good you don't want to be surveyed but on the other hand surveying is also facts and what we see what we are thinking of in terms of this joint assessment mechanism is that this is a mechanism that springs into action but what if there's no action, what are they going to do in the meantime so you know this this mechanism would require a pre-established relationship with a diverse roster of experts, qualified experts who basically do a surveying of the landscape so to say already for months or years so that basically you gather this data because only when you gather the data about a certain area and then something happens do you know because this is how it should be and all of a sudden it's different so then basically you have something where there could be an outbreak and that is basically where the surveillance would actually be very useful and that could then trigger a response I think that this is something that really needs to be addressed in that way so that would be like a database that could be expanded in cooperation with qualified qualified experts and then the last question is how do you combat disinformation let me remind you of something and that is to remember that Russia was basically accusing Ukraine of having bioweapons labs they didn't only do it once they did it three times I think the last time was in June and when they did it there were gatherings in the Security Council on this issue and basically the UN stepped forward and this was my successor as a high representative for disarmament affairs and she basically said we don't know anything about bioweapon labs in the Ukraine and even if we did there's nothing we can do about it so this basically shows you that this gap is really reinforced and the other issue that I wanted to mention which is also very important that this disinformation can be weaponized it can be twisted around it can be used in such a way that it's against another country it's against an institution whatever and again with the UN I still hope a trusted source of factual information it is my hope that if the UN does an assessment or does an investigation does a surveillance that basically the results are going to be accepted but it's the basic trust that people have to have in the information that they see out there to be twisted and so I'm going to come right here and then I'm going to come here and then I'm going to go online again so let's follow that route Good evening, my name is Cecile Four French how would you so beyond the facts collection of facts and potential what the contrast with emotion what would stop facts being dealt with properly how would the response address the issue of trust in scientists in France you'll probably be aware of what happened with DJ Rout who is a scientist, was trusted and decided that the proposed response by the government wasn't the proper one and came with his own response that is today source of controversy and obviously legal action against him so how would you address respect of the response from an authority beyond a country or other scientists deciding that it isn't the proper response I think that that's an important question why are we moving on? Don't assume that the scientific opinion is always a homogeneous one it is sometimes contested and it is a complex thing that we have to address Second question Thanks very much Adam Angler My friends in the WHO with our regular field work experience would normally say to me over a beer well generally speaking they come in and they push aside the local people who really do understand what's going on but they never listen to or rarely listen to so I guess my point for this new body is it might need to have a mechanism to locate and provide status and empowerment to the people on the ground who really do know what they're doing but don't necessarily come with the right hats and letters to give them the status they need and I don't think we can really go on with this conversation without us mentioning at least imparting that the populist governments in London and Washington consciously dismantled the mechanisms that their predecessors had created to deal precisely with this problem now this wasn't a global response but two of significant countries chose to dismantle their response mechanisms and I realise you know the UN can't name and shame but if we're having this discussion I don't think we can ignore that characteristic but a more important point I have to say is having a mechanism to empower and give status to those on the ground who really actually do know what they're doing but all too often are marginalised or put down indeed so we have a few questions from online so one is what an intergovernmental organisation based on the International Atomic Energy Agency be a good forum to promote safe and secure biolabs with a common framework that accredits labs researching deadly viruses and then they just comment that as well as promoting partnerships to reduce the number of high level biolabs required worldwide and create joint research centres akin to the one in Geneva the ESY in Hamburg and JINR in Dunbar what would potential challenges be and is it feasible in an increasingly polarised world quite a long one I think there's a very good question so thank you for all of this and I find it interesting about the trust in science question you know usually what I believe is that when you have facts but sometimes it's also a matter that we don't understand the facts if you're not a scientist or a bioscientist and you're presented with all kinds of formulas or genetic sequencing or whatever it is if you don't understand them then you're just going to take it for granted that they're okay but I very much agree with you Adam that even scientists can differ and when you look at also some of the outcomes of some of the investigations that have happened there's not always been unanimous agreement among the experts that were on this part so I think we have to basically trust that everyone is trying to do the right thing and put their opinion forward and believe in the solution that they're coming up with but on the other hand you basically get a spectrum of opinions which usually coincide pretty well and I think that that's basically what you have to take to sort of say not only having the spectrum of opinions but it's like what are you going to do about it because the whole point is to get to a solution to get to a way forward to basically mitigate the problem or address the problem whatever you want to do so I think that's really very very important and I don't know enough about the you know the event that happened in France frankly so I can't really comment on that but I think that it's very hard and you have to go by the scientific advice and I remember I lived as I think Adam mentioned for the last year in the United States and I've even seen this beforehand and there was the main person in terms of the pandemic preparedness and pandemic action and that was Fauci and Fauci was attacked numerous times you know all across the spectrum that he wasn't doing the right thing and he was wrong because the governments and particularly the high politicians have to rely on the scientific advisors to sort of see what they're doing but again this may be one case and I don't know any other ones I do think it's a very important question that you brought up about you know don't push aside the local people I think that there is something that needs to be recognized and remember I said in the beginning also that I find it important that we don't dismiss the capacities that exist in these countries but rather that we basically work with them and yes I mean local people know very well and it's not like bioscience didn't exist in the south it does and it is vibrant just like it is in the north but on the other hand what I find really important is that you know you don't have a group of people who are in this area or like who are part of the jam who are only coming from the north I mean that is something that's simply not acceptable and I spent and actually Wilmut was there as well we spent time at the global partnership in Berlin last week it was and there was a presentation that was given also on the Africa Signature Initiative which basically also talks about bioscience because basically it's a way of empowering you know countries and particularly in Africa in this case to work much more you know on these issues to actually deal with this part of the problem and that is the question that was brought up by the person from who's visiting on to the zoom is basically like I mean IEA I mean would it be good for biolabs no it wouldn't because dealing with nuclear issues but there's no organization that can equal what IEA does on the biological science side you have the biological weapons convention I think Wilmut mentioned that but basically this is a mechanism where states it's first of all it's against weapons so it doesn't deal with the regular bioscience and in the UN it has a three person secretariat which deals with arranging conferences and secretariat services and member states are encouraged to report voluntarily voluntarily once a year on their programs and you know how many respond less than 50 percent because it's voluntary they're not forced to so again there is a gap there but there is no way that right now there's thinking like well maybe we need to strengthen the biological weapons convention but don't forget it's never been kicked into action because there hasn't been a bioweapons incident so we need to really focus on the fact that not always about the gloom and doom and the weapons but we need to focus about what can actually happen and how do we address it and that's where we come in I forgot to mention in the last round of conversations the importance of your discipline and political science so if you look at the political science literature just to make this one comment you'll see the accumulated insight is that governments don't like to invest in prevention they like to invest in response because the response is visible it earns you kudos and so on and so forth you seem to be up in communities this is about investing in preparedness and that's why it's important to persuade governments to invest in preparedness and to have the political world and to put budgets aside to do it and the political science discipline is very important to understanding how to shift government priorities so I just wanted to make that point the trust that we're talking about is trust in the jam and my recommendation is that you root it both in the science community and in science yes, there are disagreements over that but you want to have credibility built around the science community because it cuts across national borders the fact is that today American scientists and European scientists speak to Chinese scientists they speak less to Russian scientists because the barriers are but that's the point of communication in the intervention build up the science community has an organic bond that's built on a particular method of discovering what the truth is and I think that's the point of unity I just want to emphasize that so trust in the jam is what we're after as a device as a policy device of intervention and that I'm suggesting is rooted in being able to establish greater trust in the science community first of all because that's the point of communication with transporters you want a global mechanism we should build on the science community and build it out even against resistance from certain quarters the point about durable mechanisms for community engagement I think that's right they are not temporary you've seen how important they are that those things are you need to have as an as an entire strategy for community engagement and that involves dealing with civil society organizations and so on and we must be able to have durable mechanisms like that and that needs to be funded they can't be funded simply for charitable donations that come and go it's important obviously to have right but there has to be government funding that's set aside for it's not expensive for having durable community engagement mechanisms the other place where there has to be durability is around political devices at the highest level and that requires in this case, policies, biodefense policies not all countries in the world have biodefense policies of the 54 African countries do have biodefense policies they have not policies but not biodefense policies and the reason for that is the reason why that matters is because of a policy of budget set aside to look after it and we need durable biodefense policies in countries so that you can't just remove a mechanism we need to become president just like that it has to be embedded in law and policies and there's a lot of work to be done in developing biodefense policies I like the idea of globally connected minimum high containment laboratories Africa has only two three four laboratories for the entire continent the USS part of it quite a few Europe as many as well so they are linked it's a single standard for maintaining high security high containment labs in terms of standards to be observed in order to have maximum biosecurity so I think that needs to be strengthened but we should have in the world a minimum number of laboratories that house pathogens that have high consequences minimum number of laboratories and they should not proliferate so we need to have a non-proliferation strategies towards biosecurity level for laboratories very important point let's go back if there's any questions I can't see the lights so I've seen one coming again and then is there anybody online okay so I'm going to come back to you for two online I'm so sorry I've got dozens of questions but I'll limit myself as much as I can I think one sector that hasn't been mentioned yet I'll be keen to get your thoughts on is the commercial sector you know, bioscience biotechnology in some ways is very much a bottom up it's a bit like the Silicon Valley space and in China we've got lots of small companies that have some quite high capable people and organisations that are doing some quite interesting things on the bioscience side and I wondered what your thoughts were on how perhaps that can be managed around you mentioned around the counter proliferation piece which I think is essential and how that might fit in to the jam or perhaps a wider issue I've got a question but I'm going to let you go first okay so could more be done to secure labs or research facilities which may be vulnerable targets for hostile actors obviously so much is spent on developed countries to secure facilities but we all know pathogens do not see borders and do you think the UN is best placed to oversee this international assistance slash aid and then just a quick one would it be more logical for these trusted centres in the global south to lead on the pandemic surveillance i.e. the jam somewhere in the global north after all the next pandemic is certainly going to come out probably of the global south okay so there's a couple questions but I want to shift the debate slightly out because I think at one level Angola and Wilmot we're being incredibly politically correct here and I want to kind of get us out of the political correctness to what is I see at one level the substantive debate it is true that there is a plurality of opinion in the scientific community almost all questions but it's also true as you suggest Angola that there is a in the South African terminology a sufficient consensus that often emerges and we need to gravitate towards the sufficient consensus that doesn't mean it will always be correct but it is if you like in the broadest interest that's the consensus we have at that point and it seems to me that that's where we have but there are two questions about implementation in political world that it seems to me we have to think through however good your evidence is in the world of international relations and even now in the world of domestic politics power makes a difference and so if there is a pathogen in a small country in the developing world the capacity of the secretary general to intervene is there because actually if article 99 says Timmy can move in his ability or her ability to move in is quite easy he sends in a set of helicopters together with the scientists they walk in, the country will grumble but they don't have the power to withstand that intervention the problem is if it breaks in a place like China or the United States or Russia your ability to do that is really a small the secretary general even if you wanted to is constrained by that possibility and yet it seems to me what Wilbur puts on the table is something which he says that in the era of bipolarity between the Soviet Union and the United States there was a set of if you like back room conversations that enabled for joint interventions around polio and other kinds of things how do we create that back room channels that allow that intervention to take place and that does require governments willing to talk and governments willing to take collective responsibility for stabilizing the world whatever you might say about bipolarity the Soviet Union and the United States did that and how do we enable those conversations in a much more multipolar world so that's the first point I wanted to put and the second which is a domestic question is how do you deal with this information now it seems to me that Wilbur is right that the majority of the population just want information but there is always a small body that will be denialist of one kind or the other and it seems to me one has to in a democratic society allow that denialism to play out but if it starts compromising the collective security of the society there needs to needs to be the willingness to act and to hold them accountable and that willingness it seems to me didn't always emerge in the COVID mechanics partly because that very denialist spoke to the agendas of some of the political players in power and again I want to put that as something to think through around the issue of political world and I wanted to get both your thoughts on that I'm going to this time start with Wilmort and then come to Angola around that so if you could this is probably our last intervention take the questions that came out and we will bring it to an end Wilmort Thank you very much as always Adam for your tough question so on the question of disinformation and this is disinformation in respect of biological weapons disinformation with regards to vaccines but on the question of biological weapons which is germane to what we've been speaking about earlier so there was a body set up called the Global Partnership after 9-11 and it deals with radiological nuclear chemical and biological threats we met last week in Berlin as Angola pointed out and it's very clear that in dealing with disinformation when it comes to anything but particularly biological weapons as well as how you deal with pandemics what is key is leadership because once you have a situation with trusted leaders in society say one thing that is science based or whatever but they are able to speak with credibility because they trusted women in society then you're making progress and the point I always make about political leaders is they are elected, they are not appointed there's no series that's used so to a point you get what you get so you can get a ball scenario, you get somebody else but that's to say we need leadership on this front it's probably the most important thing we need tools to deal with disinformation but imagine if the majority of the world leaders stand up to be completely frank about this and say that what Russia is doing is lying which is what it's doing when it comes to disinformation on biological weapons lying is being repeated and that the world's majority of countries including ours Adam say that that's a lie that would make a difference so that's the first point I wanted to make on the question of the role of the private sector the role of the private sector is key to biosecurity partly because many many many laboratories are in the private sector and therefore without out of the reach or the public sector I would say that most of the private sector labs in fact are very secure they work up to standard they certainly can't make risks where the risk lies in fact are garage scientists and rogue scientists in the rogue labs and there are a number of terrorist organizations that have shown an interest in biological weapons that they can actually make that is build them synthetically but because they would want to weaponize them it's difficult to do the greatest danger there is actually the bombing of laboratories when it comes to real terror threats around that so but to say that the private sector is key and the private sector has to be part of this initiative and there are mechanisms for that the world economic forum is one mechanism so those I messed up a gotten something those would be my two responses thank you very much let me come back right away to the private sector I find this a very interesting question and it is a very relevant question because when I think back the first treaty that was ever elaborated with the involvement of private industry was the chemical weapons convention and that was in 1997 and of course the biological weapons convention and he would talk about weapons and anything else like the joint assessment mechanism that was actually negotiated and came to fruition and into force in 1972 and in 50 years a lot has happened and that is undeniable and if you think about for example you had yes 9-11 you had a number of issues that came into the four it's not that easy to make a nuclear weapon because you need materials that are not easily available but with bio weapons if you really want to misuse biological science you can do that very easily because there have been so many advances and there is so much knowledge and you don't have to have specialized materials to do that and there is also an issue that right now you know you can have like DNA sequencing I mean there is so much advancement that has been done and if you are bright and if you have some interest in that you can actually do a lot of harm if you really wanted to so the private industry commercial sector yes is very interesting and I don't think there has been enough of an outreach with them you know how do you deal with this but I want to come to another issue and that is a very important aspect that Adam has brought out and that is like the difference between small countries and big countries I don't have an issue with that because you are absolutely right you know I mean power is might I mean look at what is happening even in the General Assembly where it is one country one vote it isn't one country one vote when you count them yes it is we have a joint assessment mechanism we have a difference here every country is sovereign every country can say to the Secretary General should he so choose I don't want you to come I mean I am sovereign you cannot cross my borders unless I invite you and I want to give you the example of when I was in charge of the Syria weapons investigation or the Syria chemical weapons investigation basically it took a long time to negotiate with Syria to get into the country because Syria said we are a sovereign country we are not like Iraq you can't just waltz into our country and do whatever you like there are certain limits that you have to observe and we are the ones who are basically negotiating with you what these limits are so that basically in this particular instance makes a big difference and we haven't quite decided what is the trigger for such an assessment is it the Secretary General offering is it the country asking so there are a variety of issues that basically have to be looked at and they are very important but the underlying fact is the country is not going to have an assessment team on the ground unless they agree to it or they ask for it so I think that this is something that we really need to keep in mind and I want to come back to two things that Wilmut says because I want to underline them because they are very important the first one he said is he talked about prevention governments don't really like to invest in prevention no they don't they like to invest in reaction in action once something happens and I think that there are some examples where governments have been raked over the coals because they've invested in something that turned out to be totally useless I mean you know this is like I remember there was some preventative mechanism or some pills that they got or something and they were thrown away in the end and it was a lot of waste of money and it was a huge line there so prevention is important but governments don't or leaders don't like to invest in it and the second issue that he raised a very important issue is the key really is leadership if the leader is trusted people will follow the leader and it's very interesting because the nuclear threat initiative has another initiative that they have started some years ago and the first result was in 2019 and that was a national health security index and it asked countries around the world and they had a lot of points 175 points to sort of say what is your preparedness against the pandemic and funnily enough I mean it was before the pandemic actually arose the first result of that was in 2019 the second one was in 2021 needless to say no country was really prepared and it was supposed to be and looked at as a help to countries to say we need to do more in sector XYZ because we're not doing well in that but one of the findings was also is that one of the key issues was that leadership made a lot of difference that people followed whatever their trusted leader said and that is something that we very often underestimate so I think that was a very two very important points that Wilmot brought out that I wanted to underline so colleagues it seems to me that we're coming to the end there are a couple of things that there is a broad agreement on it seems to me that there is a broad agreement that we are in a slightly better place to deal with pandemics simply because we've been through one and by default we've learned lessons from that it's made us more aware and that will allow us to intervene better second but that on its own is not good enough we do need more and in particular we need a new mechanism to be able to identify pathogens of unknown origin and to be able to intervene quickly and assess them understand the consequences and intervene in addressing it we do know and I think that there's broad support for the idea that intervention that joint assessment mechanism should be scientifically grounded it should be based on scientific expertise it should be multi-disciplinary as people pointed out that it should incorporate not simply the clinical sciences or the natural sciences but also trying to understand how these things play out in societies etc and it should be focused on local expertise as well it shouldn't ignore local expertise because often there are insights there that are particularly important for contextually grounded intervention there was the suggestion of a private sector don't ignore the private sector they have to be involved because of significant particular capabilities in the private sector and they need to be brought into the conversation I do think there is a challenge in this debate as we take it through we can get the mechanism we can construct it on expertise but we do have to think through political well how do we enable political well how do you and what is important about political well how do you intervene in a context where a country doesn't want you to come in that's your problem and that is a real problem the you identify it you know there is something going on you need to intervene how do you move quick enough you don't have the ability to negotiate and that makes a difference whether you're a weak country or not and there I think there needs to be some thought about protocols and when can the UN intervene quickly what are the protocols to enable that and that does require a fair degree of existing deliberation existing articles and what the existing articles allow you but how that needs to be either adapted or make dynamically interpreted to allow a quick intervention so I think that there is if you like some work to be still done thank you to Angela thank you to Wilmore James you guys have been fantastic you enabled a fantastic conversation thank you very much thank you to all of you who've been here and to the many colleagues online who've also been here this is now I think the sixth or the seventh directors lecture series we will be continuing this on a monthly basis for at least the next year and it's really about asking difficult questions thinking through difficult planetary questions but hopefully from the perspective of the majoritarian world the peoples of Africa, Asia and the Middle East thank you very much and may you have a wonderful evening thank you very very much