By Gabriel Armas-Cardona, Esq. human rights lawyer (more information below), Gabriel.Armas-Cardona@nyu.edu

Is the COVID-19 pandemic over? Depending on who you ask, you’re going to get different answers. For most people, the answer is yes, the pandemic is over. Most people characterized the pandemic primarily by the measures taken to combat the disease. Since most countries have lifted pandemic-related measures like lockdowns and mask mandates, the pandemic is over.

But if you ask public health advocates, they’d say no. Just last week, the WHO Regional Director for Europe and the Director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in a joint statement that “it is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic is still not over”. The world is still seeing half a million new cases a day, comparable to the rate in 2021 prior to the spike caused by the Omicron variant. Thanks in large part to vaccines, we’re seeing fewer deaths than we did in 2021, but we shouldn’t pretend that mass vaccination has been a complete success. High-income countries had priority access to vaccines and low-income countries are still catching up.

Regardless, one of the major questions we are asking ourselves now is what have we, as policymakers, as global health actors, as humanity, learned from the pandemic. There has been a deluge of scientific research on COVID-19 in the last 2.5 years, vastly increasing our knowledge of the disease and its impacts. But, have we incorporated the lessons learned into global and domestic policy?

On the global level, the answer is no. Vaccine nationalism is still the embraced policy as high-income countries are rolling out a new round of boosters. There is finally now a World Trade Organization waiver for vaccine patents, but it took more than two years to achieve and only covers vaccines and not all COVID-19 medical tools.

On a domestic level, the answer depends on the country. Some countries used the pandemic to consolidate power or played down the risk of the virus to justify their lack of action. Even in states that did implement health interventions like curfews or lockdowns, the policies were often done in a reactive way without consideration of human rights or international health law.

This is where the Human Rights Principles for Public Health Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response will come into play. These Principles aim to elaborate a normative framework for states’ obligations under human rights and global health law during a public health emergency. These Principles are a product of the Global Health Law Consortium and the International Commission of Jurists. The two organizations recognized that while human rights law was critical for a public health emergency, the state of the law in 2020 provided little guidance on what policymakers should do and how they should weigh competing interests.

The drafters recognized that their small, elite group shouldn’t be the only ones involved in the creation of the Principles and found funding to hold consultations with regional experts. They organized six consultations divided geographically: Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America and Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. I was the consultant in charge of the North America and Europe region.

My role was to organize a consultation with experts from the North America and Europe region to critique the current draft of the Principles. I learned later that some felt this regional consultation wasn’t needed; North America and Europe were already overrepresented in the development process. Despite this concern, it turned out that my consultation had the most critical analysis of the current draft out of all the regional consultations. No matter how superlative the drafters are, incorporating more voices and perspectives is important for both effectiveness and consensus-building. The regional consultation allowed some of the experts to take a step back and exam their work and also for advocates, practitioners, young researchers and others outside of the drafting committee to have a say. The Scientific Director of the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health and the University of Groningen’s own Prof .Toebes was one of the participants in the consultation.

For brevity and confidentiality reasons, I won’t discuss details, but I will describe the challenge the drafters face. The COVID-19 pandemic is/was more than just a public health emergency. Many people were severely affected in ways unrelated to health, such as by being unable to work or to have insufficient or insecure housing. For a state to properly engage with COVID-19 entailed a government-wide response that considered this multi-faceted impact on the populace. In theory, the Principles should engage with and promote just this vision.

However, the Principles cannot be everything to everyone. To try to incorporate recommendations on every conceivable way a state should engage with a public health emergency would bloat the Principles to the point of being unwieldy. Even if the drafters wanted to do that, they are a small team of experts that have neither unlimited expertise nor unlimited resources. Instead, the drafters must thread the needle to create a set of Principles that provides guidance to policymakers while being accessible to laypeople, seen as legitimate by states, evaluated as sound by the scientific community, and considered to progress the normative framework by the human rights community.

The Principles are scheduled to be finalized and publicly released in January 2023. Anyone that would like to be kept abreast with the drafting process can email the author to be added to a listserv.

Gabriel Armas-Cardona, Esq. is a human rights lawyer from the US with a focus on the right to health. He has lived and worked in Armenia, India, and Germany. He recently moved to the Netherlands and is looking for a work opportunity here where he can promote the realization of human rights. He can be reached by email , (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriel-armas-cardona-esq/) LinkedIn or Twitter .