WHO panel blames slow response for virus outbreak

A panel of experts commissioned by the World Health Organisation has criticised China and other countries for not moving to stem the initial outbreak of the coronavirus earlier and questioned whether the UN health agency should have labelled it a pandemic sooner.

In a report issued on Monday, the panel led by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said there were "lost opportunities to apply basic public health measures at the earliest opportunity" and that Chinese authorities could have applied their efforts "more forcefully" in January shortly after the coronavirus began sickening clusters of people.

"The reality is that only a minority of countries took full advantage of the information available to them to respond to the evidence of an emerging pandemic," the panel said.

The experts also wondered why WHO did not declare a global public health emergency sooner. The UN health agency convened its emergency committee on January 22, but did not characterise the emerging pandemic as an international emergency until a week later. At the time, WHO said its expert committee was divided on whether a global emergency should be declared.

Meanwhile, The world faces a "catastrophic moral failure" because of unequal Covid-19 vaccine policies, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was not fair for younger, healthy people in richer nations to get injections before vulnerable people in poorer states, the BBC reported.

He said over 39 million vaccine doses had been given in 49 richer states - but one poor nation had only 25 doses.