GENEVA (AP) – When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic a year ago on Thursday, it did so only after weeks of resisting the term and maintaining that the highly infectious virus could still be stopped.
A year later, the UN agency is still struggling to stay on top of the evolving science of COVID-19, to persuade countries to abandon their nationalist tendencies and help get vaccines where they are most needed.
The agency made some costly mistakes along the way: it advised people not to wear masks for months and said that COVID-19 was not widespread in the air. He also refused to publicly call countries – especially China – for errors about which senior WHO officials complained in particular.
This created a complicated policy that challenged WHO’s credibility and trapped it between two world powers, generating strong criticism of the Trump administration, from which the agency is only now emerging.
President Joe Biden’s support for WHO may provide some much needed breathing space, but the organization still faces a monumental task ahead, as it tries to project some moral authority amid a universal vaccine race that is leaving billions of people unprotected.
“WHO has been running a little behind, being cautious rather than cautious,” said Gian Luca Burci, former WHO legal advisor now at the Geneva Graduate Institute. “In times of panic, crisis and so on, maybe it would be more risky – it would have been better.”
WHO waved its first major warning flag on January 30, 2020, calling the outbreak an international health emergency. But many countries ignored or neglected the warning.
Only when WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a “pandemic” six weeks later, on March 11, 2020, did most governments act, experts said. By then, it was too late and the virus had hit every continent except Antarctica.
A year later, WHO still looks paralyzed. A WHO-led team that traveled to China in January to investigate the origins of COVID-19 was criticized for not dismissing China’s marginal theory that the virus could be transmitted through contaminated frozen seafood.
This happened after WHO repeatedly praised China last year for its quick and transparent response – although recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed that senior officials were frustrated by the country’s lack of cooperation.
“Everyone wonders why WHO praised China so much in January 2020,” said Burci, adding that the praise returned “to haunt WHO on a large scale.”
Some experts say that WHO’s mistakes were costly, and it remains heavily dependent on iron science rather than taking calculated risks to keep people safer – whether in strategies such as wearing a mask or whether COVID-19 tends to spread across the world. air.
“Undoubtedly, the failure of WHO to endorse the masks previously has cost lives,” said Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, professor of primary care health sciences at Oxford University who serves on several WHO expert committees. Not until June Did WHO advise people to wear masks regularly, long after other health agencies and several countries have done so?
Greenhalgh said she was less interested in asking WHO to atone for past mistakes than to review its policies going forward. In October, she wrote to the head of a major WHO infection control committee, raising concerns about the lack of experience of some members. She never received an answer.
“This scandal is not just a thing of the past. It is in the present and intensifying in the future, ”said Greenhalgh.
Raymond Tellier, associate professor at McGill University in Canada, specializing in coronavirus, said WHO’s continued reluctance to recognize the frequency with which COVID-19 is spread in the air may be more dangerous with the arrival of new variants of the virus identified by first time in Britain and South Africa which are even more transferable.
“If the WHO recommendations are not strong enough, we could see the pandemic go on for much longer,” he said.
With several licensed vaccines, WHO is now working to ensure that people in the world’s poorest countries receive doses through the COVAX initiative, which aims to ensure that poor countries receive COVID-19 vaccines.
But COVAX has only a fraction of the 2 billion vaccines expects to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that waited months for injections became impatient, choosing to sign their own private agreements for faster access to the vaccine.
WHO chief Tedros responded largely by calling on countries to act in “solidarity”, warning that the world is on the verge of “catastrophic moral failure” if vaccines are not distributed fairly. Although he asked rich countries to share their doses immediately with developing countries and not to make new agreements that would jeopardize the supply of the vaccine to the poorest countries, nobody forced it.
“WHO is trying to lead by moral authority, but repeating ‘solidarity’ continuously when it is being ignored by countries acting in their own interest shows that they are not recognizing the reality,” said Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for global development. “It’s time to expose things as they are.”
Still, during the pandemic, WHO repeatedly refused to blame rich countries for their wrong attempts to stop the virus. Internally, WHO officials described some of the approaches of its largest member countries to contain COVID-19 as “an unfortunate laboratory for studying the virus” and “macabre”.
More recently, Tedros seems to have found a slightly firmer voice – telling the truth to leaders like Germany’s president about the need for rich countries to share vaccines or criticize China for being late in not issuing visas quickly. for the WHO-led research team.
Irwin Redlener of Columbia University said that WHO should be more aggressive in instructing countries on what to do, given the extremely uneven way in which COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed.
“WHO cannot order countries to do things, but they can give very clear and explicit guidance that makes it difficult for countries not to follow,” said Redlener.
WHO senior officials have repeatedly said that it is not the agency’s style to criticize countries.
At a press conference this month, WHO senior adviser, Dr. Bruce Aylward, said simply, “We cannot tell individual countries what to do.”
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AP medical writer Maria Cheng reported from London.
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