Filenews 12 May 2021
The global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic could have been avoided if the international community had reacted more quickly and given the World Health Organisation the powers needed, says an independent international commission, which was called upon by the WHO to assess global reflexes.
"The situation we are in today could have been prevented," said Helen Johnson Sirleaf, a former Liberian president who co-heads the commission along with former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark.
"It is due to myriad failures, gaps and delays in preparation and management. This was partly because of the failure to learn the lessons of the past," he said.
In their report entitled Covid-19: Let it be the latest pandemic published on Wednesday, the committee's experts denounce a "real Chernobyl of the 21st century" and call for immediate changes to warning and prevention systems.
Although rigorous, the expert report does not consider that there is only one culprit for the evolution of the pandemic.
This is also explicitly stated in the experts' report: "It is clear that the combination of bad strategic choices, a lack of desire to tackle inequalities and a system from which coordination was lacking created a toxic cocktail that allowed the pandemic to turn into a catastrophic humanitarian crisis."
"Delays everywhere"
The committee was appointed by World Health Organisation (WHO) Secretary-General Tedros Antanum Grebregeus on the basis of the decision adopted in May 2020 by the member countries and composed of 13 experts. They have been looking for eight months at the spread of the pandemic and the measures taken by the WHO and the countries to tackle it.
Since the beginning of the health crisis, the WHO has been criticised for the way it is managed, notably for its belated recommendation on the use of the mask. The US has accused the agency of being particularly lenient towards China, where the new coronavirus first appeared, and of delaying declaring a global health emergency.
For its part, China has been criticised for trying to hide the epidemic.
Certainly "we can say that there have been clear delays in China, but there have been delays everywhere," commented former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, co-chair of the committee.
"It's been a long time," experts noted, between the detection of an outbreak of an outbreak of unknown pneumonia in the second half of December 2019 and the WHO's declaration of a global health emergency on January 30.
According to the committee, the WHO should have declared a state of emergency by the first meeting of the Crisis Committee on 22 January. However, even if a state of emergency had been declared a week earlier, things would not have changed much due to "the inaction of so many countries," Clarke admitted.
Because it was only on 11 March 2020, when Tedros described the situation as a pandemic, that countries realised the magnitude of the risk.
February 2020, a lost month
In this respect February 2020 was a "lost month", during which many countries could have taken steps to limit the spread of the virus.
The panel recommends that governments and the international community adopt reforms without delay aimed at changing the global system for preparing, warning and tackling pandemics.
That is why experts propose a number of measures, such as the creation of a Global Health Threat Response Council, but also the implementation of a new global monitoring system based on 'full transparency'. This system will enable the WHO to immediately publish information on epidemics that may spread and become pandemics without seeking the approval of countries.
Moreover, the term of office of the PRESIDENT of the WHO should be one and limited to seven years in order to avoid succumbing to political pressure.
The panel of experts is also proposing a series of immediate measures to halt the spread of covid-19, including asking rich countries to offer more than 2 billion doses of vaccines by mid-2022, including at least one billion by September, in 92 countries with small or medium incomes.
Patent agreement
At the same time, the WHO and the World Trade Organisation should call on governments and pharmaceutical companies to reach an agreement to voluntarily remove vaccine patents and sharing technological knowledge for their production in order to increase the manufacture of covid-19 vaccines.
"If no agreement can be reached within three months, then vaccine patents should be lifted immediately," Clarke stressed.
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