Probe into global pandemic response
The international investigation into how the world responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, in which an independent panel has promised to ask hard questions about the response to a disease that appeared less than a year ago and has killed almost 1 million people, begins on Friday.
The 13 members of the WHOinitiated but independent panel — including former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, a Nobel laureate and medical specialists — will first set out a plan to manage this gargantuan task, called for by more than a hundred countries at a gathering of the World Health Organisation’s governing body this year.
“We will ask with the benefit of hindsight how WHO and national Governments could have worked differently knowing what we now know about the disease,” said panel cochair Clark this month.
Clark was appointed to lead the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response with Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the former President of Liberia.
The co-chairs announced their pick of 11 additional members from among those nominated by countries at the start of this month. They include China’s top Covid-19 expert Zhong Nanshan; former US ambassador Mark Dybul, who has headed the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and Preeti Sudan, former health secretary of India.
While experts say the calibre of the panel shows it has political support, it is not yet clear how far its mandate will reach in seeking answers for what went right and wrong in the global response to a health crisis that has devastated world economies, cost millions of jobs and frayed international relations.
The “scope and the limitations” of the panel’s review remain to be seen, according to Tikki Pangestu, a former WHO director of Research Policy and Co-operation. “But the most important thing is that it provides, hopefully, an independent platform, which is not biased either toward the WHO or toward its member countries,” said Pangestu, who is a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.
One unknown is the extent to which the panel will address questions about the initial handling of the outbreak after it was detected in China when there was a delay of several weeks between the announcement of an outbreak and confirmation from China that a new illness was spreading between people.
The “early phase of the pandemic — its emergence and global spread” will be among the “broad themes” of the evaluation, according to Clark, noting this would include “when and how” Covid-19 emerged.
Separately, the WHO said it would lead an international team to China for a scientific inquiry into the origins of the disease that was first identified in the city of Wuhan.