The need for an international inquiry commission on the COVID-19 pandemic

The original article in Italian is available here.

The COVID-19 pandemic is still gripping the world, and if the numbers of positive cases are decreasing in Europe and North America, South America and Africa are still facing the disease in its worst aspects. Globally we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, although nobody knows how daily life will be when we reach that light.

The first months of the medic emergency got us used to living in doubt: information given by the media was chaotic, contradictory and unclear. At first this aspect caused bewilderment, in a short time it became routine.

But now that Phase 2 has started in various countries and it seems that the worst is gone, the awareness arises that in the near future detailed and independent investigations will be needed on what happened, on why, on what went well and what went wrong.

There are still too many questions about how this virus passed to humans. Which animal acted as a link between bat and man? When? Has China underrated the situation or did Western governments fail to understand its gravity and take countermeasures? A commission should clarify these doubts and what the crucial steps have been and ascertain them once and for all, so as to remove any pretext of tension between China and the United States, before this leads to a new cold war with even worse consequences than the pandemic.

An effort similar to what would be needed was now made by the province of Ontario when it called a commission to investigate SARS, reconstructing the facts from the birth of the virus from the wet markets of the Chinese province of Guangdong to the medical response in Canada. SARS was much deadlier than COVID-19, but also much less widespread, with only 8000 cases in the world, and it is therefore normal that only Canada was interested in investigating what happened.

An independent commission should now clarify at least these points:

• when the virus passed from animal to man
• what happened to the Wuhan market in early December last year
• how it spread across the five continents
• what has been done correctly by the states that faced the pandemic
• what has been done incorrectly by the same nations
• what procedures should be put in place from now on to avoid future pandemics or to improve the reaction

The real challenge will be to put in place an international team of experts, because there is no such precedent. In recent history we have seen international commissions investigating human rights violations in places like Syria or Darfur, but these were commissions set up by the United Nations and in the case of COVID-19 a similar scenario is unthinkable due to the pressure that China could exercise compromising neutrality. And even Putin's Russia will hardly want to participate in an investigation that could shed light on its targeted disinformation campaign and threats to doctors to keep silent on the real dimensions of the spread of the disease.

The best that can be hoped for is a joint investigation of the NATO area countries; the United States is the country that has the most experience of investigative commissions, which are not fake investigations to hide the government's faults but real independent investigations, as confirmed in the recent cases of the Muller Report on Russiagate or the 9/11 Commission Report. Certainly the USA can have a leading role in a hypothetical and desirable commission on COVID-19, but this time they could and should be helped by its allies. It would be an unprecedented event, but so is the COVID-19 pandemic.