Stripping out a cascade of one-year failures, a World Health Organization panel reports in a striking report how governments and public health organizations around the world responded slowly and ineffectively to the coronavirus, despite years of warnings.
The interim report, an initial project for reform, describes the wrong assumptions, ineffective planning and slow responses – including WHO’s own wrong steps – that helped fuel a pandemic that killed more than two million people.
“We have failed in our collective capacity to come together in solidarity to create a protective human security network,” writes the Independent Panel for Preparing and Responding to Pandemic.
Many of the shortcomings, such as the inability of governments to obtain protective equipment or to perform generalized contact tracking, have long been painfully clear during the course of the pandemic. But the report is blunt in its assessment that, repeatedly, those who were responsible for protecting and leading failed to do either.
The panel, led by Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia, is still conducting its investigation. But in writing an interim report and defining the scope of its investigation, the panel makes it clear that the world needs to rethink its approach to outbreaks.
The report describes one flaw leading to another, from the “slow, uncomfortable and undecided” pandemic alert system, to years of preparedness plans that have not been followed, to disconnected and even obstructive responses from national governments.
Public health officials have also stumbled. The investigators said they could not understand why a World Health Organization committee waited until January 30 to declare an international health emergency. (The Chinese government has lobbied other governments against declaring such an emergency).
And despite decades of predictions that a viral pandemic was inevitable and years of high-level committees, task forces and panels aimed at preparing WHO for this emergency, reforms were slow to take place. “The failure to enact fundamental changes, despite the warnings issued, left the world dangerously exposed, as the Covid-19 pandemic proves,” says the report.
But WHO’s stumbling blocks did not excuse the repeated failures of world leaders. For even after health officials gave a clear warning signal, the report notes: “In many countries, that signal has been ignored.”
The report also accuses public health leaders of responding slowly to the first evidence that people without symptoms can spread the new coronavirus. The first reports from China and another from Germany documented this phenomenon. But leading health agencies, including the World Health Organization, provided contradictory and sometimes misleading advice, a New York Times investigation found earlier.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appointed the panel to review Covid-19’s response worldwide. Although the panel said the report was based on hundreds of documents, consultations with experts and more than 100 interviews with frontline respondents, it is not clear whether the investigators spoke to key health officials or reviewed internal documents.
Many of the initial findings have been identified previously or have been obvious for many months. But the collection of errors remains shocking even when it is not surprising, and in explaining them, the panel hopes to chart a path for change.
The organization declined to comment on the report before its member governments examined it.
Details on the 34-page report are sparse, but it says that China had evidence of genome sequencing that a new virus was circulating in Wuhan in December 2019. Health officials could have acted more quickly and decisively to contain the outbreak. says the report. however, country after country repeated many of the same mistakes.
“Opportunities to apply basic public health measures have been lost,” says the report.
Instead of coming together to defend proven health responses, governments and their citizens have been fragmented. The use of masks and social detachment have become political statements. Conspiracy theories have spread wildly. And governments have failed to carry out the routine tests and contact tracking necessary to control the disease.
Too often, the researchers found, national leaders make health decisions aimed at keeping their economies afloat, although they have not chosen many countries to be criticized. This proved to be a false choice. The panel found that countries that responded strongly and effectively to the outbreak also did better economically, even as the global economy lost more than $ 7 trillion.
“This is clearly a case where billions can save trillions,” says the report.
This conclusion is an implicit censorship of countries like the United States, where President Trump demanded that the country remain open to business. “We cannot allow the cure to be worse than the problem itself,” he said in late March, when 30,000 Americans tested positive.
That number now exceeds 23 million, and the country leads the world with almost 400,000 deaths.
“Health containment measures should have been implemented immediately in any country with a probable case,” said the report. “They were not.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has already forced public health officials to reconsider some of their assumptions. It has long been accepted, for example, that the travel ban did more harm than good, delaying medical care and punishing countries unfairly. That thinking changed, and the panel stated that travel restrictions “most likely were useful in containing the broadcast”.
The interim report suggests that its final document will address more systemic challenges facing the World Health Organization, which operates by consensus of national governments and has no authority to enforce its own rules. The report states that there is a big gap between what is expected of the organization and how much money it receives.
Trump withdrew the United States from the organization, withdrawing its biggest source of funding, but President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said he would join again.
Looking to the future, the panel noted that inequality jeopardized the worldwide launch of vaccines. To demonstrate this disparity, the report includes a graph that shows when countries should vaccinate their populations.
Rich countries like the United States hope to be almost done with their campaigns by the end of the year; it is unlikely that poor countries have even vaccinated their vulnerable populations until then. Vaccination campaigns are expected to continue until the end of 2023.
“Whether you were born in Liberia, New Zealand or elsewhere, it shouldn’t be the factor that determines your place in the vaccine queue,” says the report.