It is a bit much for Boris Johnson to lecture the world on how to deal with pandemics

Editorial: A little more humility from the prime minister at the United Nations General Assembly would have been welcome

Johnson addresses the UN General Assembly remotely on Saturday

It seems curious that the leader of a country with one of the highest coronavirus death tolls per million should lecture the world on how to deal with pandemics. Boris Johnson told a virtual session of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday that we must “unite and turn our fire against our common foe”, as he urged the international community to set up a global early warning system for future infectious diseases.

Some of the lessons of the last nine months are fairly uncontroversial. There was an early warning system for pandemics, but it didn’t work well. In part, that may have been because the Chinese government was reluctant to admit that it had a problem, but it was mostly because much of the world was preparing for the wrong kind of illness, assuming that it would be a form of influenza and that there would be little that could be done to control its spread.

Perhaps the most difficult lesson to learn is that the world needs to be better prepared for the unexpected. It makes sense to stockpile protective equipment in any case, and the prime minister’s plan to work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to research other possible viruses in animals that might infect humans is important. The risks of cross-species viruses have been known for some time, but the research into this subject has not been given the resources it warranted. The costs of coronavirus have made that abundantly clear.