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Covid-19: WHO Urged to Reform After Panel Finds Failures Worsened Pandemic
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May 14, 2021
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3:07Now PlayingThe World Health Organization should be overhauled and given more authority to investigate global disease threats, according to a review of the international Covid-19 response that found a myriad of failures, gaps, and delays allowed the coronavirus to mushroom into a pandemic.
While stopping short of assigning blame to any particular factor, the report released May 12 by an independent panel co-chaired by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark linked the severity of the global outbreak to deficiencies across governments, the WHO and other multilateral organizations, and regulations that guide official actions.
The panel also called for an agreement to waive vaccine patents, limited terms for WHO leaders, and an oversight body and legally binding treaty to bolster the prevention and response to future pandemics. The international system, the panel said, remains unfit to avoid another disease from spiraling into one matching Covid-19, which threatens to cost the world economy $22 trillion by 2025.
“The situation we find ourselves in today could have been prevented,” former Liberia President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the panel’s other co-chair, told reporters over Zoom Monday. “It is due to a myriad of failures, gaps, and delays in preparedness and response.”
In the first weeks of the pandemic, the WHO could have warned countries to assume that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spreading among people as a precaution, according to the panel, which was established at the request of the World Health Assembly, WHO’s decision-making body, a year ago.
WHO also could have declared the outbreak in Wuhan, China, a public health emergency of international concern -- the highest level of global alert -- earlier by at least Jan. 22, Clark said.
The role of the WHO and its director-general have been contentious from the early days of the pandemic as governments sought to understand how the virus emerged and was allowed to spread unchecked.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday he looks forward to discussing the recommendations with member-states “to build a stronger WHO and a healthier, safer, fairer future for all of us.”
The 73-year-old United Nations agency came under blistering criticism from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who claimed it had coddled China, allowing it to conceal the origin of the virus, and threatened to withhold funding.
WHO represents 194 member-states, which collectively decide how strong and well-funded it wants the organization to be, said Joanne Liu, a former international president of Doctors Without Borders who was one of 11 members of the independent panel.
“We can blame China for losing a few days, and we can blame WHO for losing maybe a week before calling the public health emergency of international concern, but basically 90% of the countries around the globe sat on their hands for four-to-six weeks,” Liu said in an interview over Zoom. “The reality is, it’s on them.”
The WHO was hindered by its regulations, which aren’t conducive to taking a precautionary approach, according to Clark. The “slow and deliberate pace” with which information is treated under the International Health Regulations and the alert system used were out of step with a fast-moving respiratory pathogen and the swift availability of information through digital tools and social media, the panel found.
“Covid-19 is the 21st century’s Chernobyl moment -- not because a disease outbreak is like a nuclear accident, but because it has shown so clearly the gravity of the threat to our health and well-being,” the report said. “It has caused a crisis so deep and wide that presidents, prime ministers and heads of international and regional bodies must now urgently accept their responsibility to transform the way in which the world prepares for and responds to global health threats.”
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