WHO director calls for world pandemic treaty to prepare for Disease X

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World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus has called on countries to sign on to the health organization’s pandemic treaty so the world can prepare for "Disease X."

Ghebreyesus, speaking in front of an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, said that he hoped countries would reach a pandemic agreement by May to address this "common enemy."

Disease X is a hypothetical "placeholder" virus that has not yet been formed, but scientists say it could be 20 times deadlier than COVID-19. It was added to the WHO’s short list of pathogens for research in 2017 that could cause a "serious international epidemic," according to a 2022 WHO press release.

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Ghebreyesus said that COVID-19 was the first Disease X, but it's important to prepare for another pandemic.

"There are things that are unknown that may happen, and anything happening is a matter of when, not if, so we need to have a placeholder for that, for the diseases we don’t know," Ghebreyesus said.

"We lost many people [during COVID] because we couldn’t manage them," Ghebreyesus said at the global confab. "They could have been saved, but there was no space. There was not enough oxygen. So how can you have a system that can expand when the need comes?"

He said that a shared response via the