Media's disingenuous portrayal of Canada's "pandemic early warning system"

There has been much rending of garments and tearing of hair in the media over the demise of Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), which was effectively abandoned in May 2019. An easy scapegoat for Canada's experience of COVID-19 makes just too good a story, but I think its real significance has probably been much overstated.

In fact, it seems like the  network, often described, rather grandly, as our "pandemic early warning system", was established in 2009, but was already starting to be run down and reassigned as early as 2013. In 2009, for example, the network issued 877 alerts (a ridiculous number, and way too many for any government official to keep track of and assess). This had already fallen to 198 by 2013, and just 21 alerts were issued in 2018.

So, this was not a case of the Liberal government making a single bad decision in 2019; it was a fait accompli long before that. And anyway, it turns out that GPHIN itself had, to a large extent, control over its own budget and its priorities, and it was not really, as it is usually portrayed, a dramatic decision of a faceless bureaucrat (or even a Prime Minister) to "pull the plug" on an organization that was at the top of its game, and which could have somehow saved Canada from the COVID pandemic and saved thousands of lives.

There seems to be little evidence that the network ever saved ANY lives, even through outbreaks of SARS, H1N1, Zika and Ebola. In the case of COVID-19, governments around the world were well aware of it in January 2020, but very few considered it to require any action until March. Even then, the virus was not well understood, and most countries were not  giving good, effective advice until much later. GPHIN would not have changed this. If GPHIN had issued an alert in, say, December, would anything have transpired any differently? I don't think so.

In fact, you can probably say the same thing about the UN's investigation of China's early communication about the virus. If China had told the world in December rather than January that there was this unexplained virus it was concerned about in Wuhan, what would actually have changed in the world's reaction to it? (Setting aside the fact that very few people outside of China believe a word that China says these days anyway...) This is also, to a large extent, a more-or-less pointless search for a scapegoat, not so much by the UN, but by many member countries.

And GPHIN? Meh.