GENEVA (AP) – When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on Thursday a year ago, it did so only after a few weeks to resist the term and maintain that the highly contagious virus continues to strike. can be.
A year later, the UN agency is still struggling to keep abreast of the evolving science of COVID-19, persuading countries to abandon their nationalist tendencies and helping to get vaccinations where they are most needed.
The agency made some costly mistakes along the way: it discouraged people from wearing no masks for months, claiming that COVID-19 was not widely distributed. It also did not want to publicly call on countries – especially China – for mistakes that senior WHO officials have privately grumbled about.
It has created troublesome policies that have challenged the credibility of the WHO and pushed it between two world powers, sparking the criticism of the powerful Trump administration from which the agency is only now emerging.
President Joe Biden’s support for the WHO may provide a much-needed breathing space, but the organization still faces a monumental task as it seeks to project moral authority amid a universal scramble for vaccines that billions of people leave unprotected.
“WHO got a little behind, careful rather than precautionary,” said Gian Luca Burci, a former WHO legal adviser now at Geneva’s Graduate Institute. “In times of panic, of a crisis, and so on, it might have been better to be more on a limb – to take a risk.”
WHO waved its first major warning flag on January 30, 2020, calling the outbreak an international emergency. But many countries have ignored or ignored the warning.
Only when the Director-General of the WTO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared a “pandemic” six weeks later, on 11 March 2020, did most governments act. By that time it was too late, and the virus had reached every continent except Antarctica.
A year later, it appears that the WHO is still tied up. A WHO-led team that traveled to China in January to investigate the origins of COVID-19 has been criticized for failing to support China’s marginal theory that the virus could be spread by frozen seafood.
This came after WHO repeatedly praised China last year for its swift, transparent response – although recordings of private meetings were obtained by The Associated Press. showed that top officials were frustrated by the lack of cooperation in the country.
“Everyone was wondering why the WHO praised China in January so much in 2020,” Burci said, adding that the praise came back “to haunt the WHO.”
Some experts believe that the WHO’s mistakes are costly, and that they remain too dependent on iron-based science instead of calculated risks to keep people safer – whether strategies such as masking or COVID-19 are often spread by air.
“Without a doubt, the WTO’s failure to endorse masks earlier costs lives,” said Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of health sciences for primary care at the University of Oxford, who sits on several WHO expert committees. Only in June WHO advised people to wear masks regularly, long after other health institutions and numerous countries have done so.
Greenhalgh said she was less interested in compensating the WHO for past mistakes than in reviewing its policies going forward. In October, she chaired an important WHO committee on infection control, expressing concern about the lack of expertise among some members. She never got an answer.
“This scandal was not just in the past. It is in the present and will increase in the future, ”Greenhalgh said.
Raymond Tellier, an associate professor at McGill University in Canada who specializes in coronaviruses, said the persistent unwillingness of the WHO to recognize how often COVID-19 is distributed in the air could be more dangerous with the advent of new virus variants first identified in Britain and South Africa. is even more transferable.
“If the WTO’s recommendations are not strong enough, we can see that the pandemic will continue for much longer,” he said.
With several licensed vaccines, WHO is now working to ensure that people in the poorest countries in the world 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 it hopes to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that have been waiting months for shots have become impatient, choose to sign their own private transactions for faster access to vaccines.
WHO chief Tedros has largely responded by calling on countries to act in ‘solidarity’ and warning that the world is on the brink of a ‘catastrophic moral failure’. if vaccines are not distributed fairly. Although he asked rich countries no one is obliged to share their doses immediately with developing countries and not enter into new transactions that would jeopardize the vaccine supply for poorer countries.
“WHO tries to lead by moral authority, but to repeat ‘solidarity’ every time it is ignored by countries acting in its own interest, shows that they do not recognize reality,” said Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for Global Development. “It’s time to call things out as they are.”
Yet throughout the pandemic, the WHO has repeatedly refused to reprimand rich countries for their erroneous efforts to stop the virus. Internally described WHO officials some of their largest member states’ approaches to proposing COVID-19 as an ‘unfortunate laboratory to study the virus’ and’ macabre ‘.
Recently, Tedros seems to have found a slightly firmer voice – the truth speaks to leaders such as the German president about the need for wealthy countries to share vaccines or to criticize China for not issuing visas quickly. to the investigation team led by the WHO.
Irwin Redlener of Columbia University said the WHO should be more aggressive in educating countries on what to do, given the extremely unequal way COVID-19 vaccines are distributed.
“WHO can not command countries to do things, but they can give very clear and explicit guidance that makes it difficult for countries not to follow,” Redlener said.
WHO top officials have repeatedly said that it is not the agency’s style to criticize countries.
At a press conference this month, senior adviser to the WTO, dr. Bruce Aylward, simply put, “We can not tell individual countries what to do.”
___
AP Medical writer Maria Cheng reported from London.
__
– Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic,https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak