12. Chemical, biological and health security threats

Chapter:

12. Chemical, biological and health security threats

Source:

SIPRI Yearbook 2022

Author(s):

Filippa Lentzos, Una Jakob

In 2021 the Covid-19 pandemic continued to wreak, in the words of the World Health Organization (WHO), ‘unprecedented devastation on global population health’. By the end of 2021, the WHO had received reports of over 286 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide, and there had been over 5.4 million recorded deaths. The actual number of infections and recorded deaths were likely to be considerably higher from undiagnosed cases and generally poor Covid-19-related data. The pandemic’s global socio-economic impacts included economic recession, millions of job losses, extreme inequity, political divisions, and educational losses (see section I). The origins of the pandemic continued to be a politically divisive subject. A report by a joint WHO–China team in March 2021 concluded that of four origin hypotheses the ‘most likely’ pathway was that the virus jumped from one animal species to another before infecting people. However, the report was heavily criticized and the WHO concluded that all theories remained open. United States intelligence assessments were also inconclusive about the virus’s origin but agreed that it was not developed as a biological weapon and that the Chinese government did not know about it prior to the outbreak. Although the origin question remained unresolved at the end of 2021, the WHO had established a permanent International scientific advisory group for origins of novel pathogens (SAGO), which was expected to play a vital role in the next phase of studies into the virus’s origin.