WHO could have sounded Covid alarm sooner: Panel

GENEVA : The catastrophic scale of the Covid-19 pandemic could have been prevented, an independent global panel concluded on Wednesday, but a “toxic cocktail” of dithering and poor coordination meant the warning signs went unheeded. The panel said the WHO could have declared the situation a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), its highest level of alarm, on January 22, 2020. Instead, it waited eight more days before doing so.

GENEVA: The catastrophic scale of the Covid-19 pandemic could have been prevented, an independent global panel concluded on Wednesday, but a “toxic cocktail” of dithering and poor coordination meant the warning signs went unheeded.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) said a series of bad decisions meant Covid-19 went on to kill more than 3.3 million people so far and devastate the global economy.

Institutions “failed to protect people” and science-denying leaders eroded public trust in health interventions, the IPPPR said in its report.

Early responses to the outbreak detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019 “lacked urgency”, with February 2020 a costly “lost month” as countries failed to heed the alarm, said the panel.

To tackle the pandemic, it called on the richest countries to donate a billion vaccine doses to the poorest. The panel also urged the world’s wealthiest nations to fund new organisations dedicated to preparing for the next pandemic.

Requested by World Health Organization (WHO) member states last May, the report, “Covid-19: Make it the Last Pandemic”, argued the global alarm system needed overhauling to prevent a similar catastrophe.

“We have identified failures at every stage and we do believe that it could have been possible to prevent this pandemic,” panel co-chair and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said. “We cannot simply point to one individual who is ultimately responsible.”

The report said the emergence of Covid-19 was characterised by a mixture of “some early and rapid action, but also by delay, hesitation, and denial. Poor strategic choices, unwillingness to tackle inequalities and an uncoordinated system created a toxic cocktail that allowed the pandemic to turn into a catastrophic human crisis.”

The threat of a pandemic had been overlooked and countries were woefully unprepared to deal with one, the report found.

Sirleaf said, “The world had been warned that this would happen. This should never happen again. This must be the last pandemic to cause destruction on the scale we are witnessing today.”

The panel said the WHO could have declared the situation a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 22, 2020. Instead, it waited for eight more days before doing so.

As for the initial outbreak, “there were clearly delays in China - but there were delays everywhere”, she added.

In the near term, the panel said rich, well-vaccinated countries should provide the 92 poorest territories in the Covax scheme with at least one billion vaccine doses by September 1, and more than two billion by mid-2022.