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.

As Mr Johnson said, it is “crucial not to learn the wrong lessons”, and some of the lessons are more contentious. It is not obvious that the World Health Organisation did such a good job that it deserves an increased dose of British taxpayers’ funding over the next four years, and it would have been worth the prime minister making that case.

Nor is it obvious that Mr Johnson is the best person to urge the world to reduce trade barriers that impeded the response to coronavirus – he cited export controls on disinfectant and soap. As the leader of a country that is, uniquely, negotiating a deal that will increase barriers to trade with its nearest neighbours, he might have provoked hollow laughter had there been more of a physical audience to hear his comments. Of all the leaders to complain that because of the pandemic “we’ve seen borders spring up”, it should not have been the one who is seeking to impose a trade border in what has been Europe’s common market.

The prime minister made a folksy and energetic case that “humanity has been caught napping” by the virus, and that it was “absurd, outrageous” that a microscopic enemy should have “routed the unity of the human race”. No one could disagree with his appeal for unity, or for his plans to share vaccines, if they are developed, with lower-income countries at speed and on a massive scale.

But was he the right person to tell the world how it should respond? Of course, it is too early to say why some countries have been hit harder by coronavirus than others. Mr Johnson complained with some justification of the “grisly reverse Olympic league tables” of countries engaged in competitive schadenfreude. It is possible that there is a randomness in the way the disease spreads; or it may be that unknown factors render some populations more vulnerable to infection than others. But it is likely that countries with strong localised disease control systems and good testing facilities performed better, at least in the first nine months.

A little more humility from Mr Johnson, and a bit more listening rather than speaking, was what this moment called for.