GENEVA (AP) – A panel of World Health Organization experts has criticized China and other countries for failing to stem the initial outbreak of the coronavirus earlier, questioning whether the UN health agency should have called it a pandemic earlier .
In a report released to the media on Monday, the panel led by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said there were “lost opportunities” to take basic health measures in place as early as possible. set.
“What is clear to the panel is that social health measures could be applied more strongly by local and national health authorities in China in January,” he said.
Hua Chunying, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, disputed whether China had reacted too slowly.
“As the first country to sound the alarm to the epidemic worldwide, China has made immediate and decisive decisions,” she said, noting that Wuhan – where the first human cases were identified – locked up within three weeks of the outbreak. is.
“All countries, not just China, but also the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan or any other country, must all try to do better,” Hua said.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson Sirleaf said it was up to countries whether they wanted to overhaul the WHO to give more authority to eradicate outbreaks, and said the organization was also limited by the lack of funding.
“The end result is that the WHO does not have the power to enforce anything,” she said. “All it can do is be invited.”
Last week, an international team of WTO-led scientists arrived in Wuhan to investigate the origins of the pandemic after months of political struggle to secure China’s approval for the investigation.
The panel also cited evidence of cases in other countries at the end of January, saying that public health measures should have been put in place immediately in any country with a probable case, saying “it was not.”
The experts also wondered why WHO had not previously declared a global public health emergency – its highest alert for outbreaks. The UN health agency convened its emergency committee on January 22, but only a week later the emerging pandemic was described as an international emergency.
“Another question is whether it would help if WHO used the word pandemic earlier than it did,” the panel said.
WHO first described the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, weeks after the virus began causing explosive outbreaks in numerous continents, and meets the WHO definition of a flu pandemic.
When the coronavirus started spreading all over the world, the WHO’s top experts argued how contagious the virus was and said that it was not as contagious as the flu and that people without symptoms rarely spread the virus. Scientists have since concluded that COVID-19 transmits even faster than flu and that a significant portion of the spread comes from people who do not look sick.
In recent years, the WHO has come under heavy criticism for handling the response to COVID-19. US President Donald Trump has complained to the UN health agency for “colluding” with China to cover up the scale of the initial outbreak before US funding for WHO was halted and the country pulled out of the organization.
The UN Health Agency bowed to international pressure at its annual meeting of its member states last year by creating the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The WHO chief appointed Johnson Sirleaf and Clark – who both had previous ties to the UN agency – to lead the team.
An Associated Press Investigation in June, the WTO found that it had repeatedly publicly praised China, while officials privately complained that Chinese officials no longer shared critical epidemic information with them.
Although the panel concluded that ‘many countries have taken minimal action to prevent the spread (of COVID-19) internally and internationally’, it does not name specific countries. It also refused to call on the WHO for failing to sharply criticize countries for their mistakes instead of praising countries for their response.
Last month, the author of a withdrawn WHO report on Italy’s pandemic response said he had warned his bosses in May that people could die and that the agency could suffer “catastrophic” reputational damage if it allowed political concerns to suppress the document, according to emails provided by the AP.
To date, the pandemic has killed more than 2 million people worldwide.
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AP Medical writer Maria Cheng reported from Toronto. Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.
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