COVID CATASTROPHE COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED: GLOBAL PANEL

Says major overhaul of WHO needed

The World Health Organization (WHO) 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 Wednesday by an independent panel cochaired 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 on Monday. “This was partly due to a failure to learn from the past.”

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 January 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.

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 were out of step with a fast-moving respiratory pathogen and the swift availability of information, the panel found.