Public inquiry into handling of pandemic in spring 2022
Top Story
May 13, 2021
LONDON: The Government will set up an independent public inquiry with statutory powers into the handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Boris Johnson has said.
The Prime Minister told MPs the inquiry, which was welcomed by some bereaved families, will begin in spring 2022 and will place “the state’s actions under the microscope”.
The inquiry will be able to take oral evidence under oath, he said, adding that the state has an obligation “to learn every lesson for the future”. It comes as a damning report from the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO), said a quicker international response could have stopped the 2019 Covid-19 outbreak in China becoming a global catastrophe.
6 hours ago
Helen Clark on The AM Show. Credits: Video - The AM Show; Images - Getty Images/Reuters
Helen Clark says the World Health Organization (WHO) should have called COVID-19 a pandemic far earlier than it did, but China s failures, delays and gaps in action are what let it become one.
Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, co-chaired the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, which looked into the global response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which to date has claimed at least 3.3 million lives - likely more.
Its report
COVID-19: Make It the Last Pandemic, released Thursday, found a toxic cocktail of poor strategic choices, unwillingness to tackle inequalities, and an uncoordinated system led to the disease sweeping the world.
GENEVA: The catastrophic scale of the Covid-19 pandemic could have been prevented, an independent global panel concluded on Wednesday, but a “toxic cocktail” of dithering and poor coordination meant the warning signs went unheeded.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said a series of bad decisions meant Covid-19 went on to kill more than 3.3 million people so far and devastate the global economy.
Institutions “failed to protect people” and science-denying leaders eroded public trust in health interventions, the IPPPR said in its long-awaited final report.
Early responses to the outbreak detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019 “lacked urgency”, with February 2020 a costly “lost month” as countries failed to heed the alarm, said the panel.
In a wide-ranging report released on Wednesday night titled
Covid-19: Make it the Last Pandemic, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response made a number of recommendations to battle the current global health situation and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Among the recommendations is giving the World Health Organisation more power to announce disease outbreaks without first getting permission from the host country and that wealthy nations should donate vaccinations to poorer countries to stop new variants of COVID-19 from developing.
Meanwhile, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has confirmed Australia has ordered 25 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to be distributed from the end of this year into next year to bolster Australia’s vaccination program.
India Covid crisis: Experts blast early pandemic failures as deaths top 250,000
AFP/Geneva Filed on May 13, 2021
India added a record 4,205 deaths to its Covid-19 toll in the past 24 hours.
An expert panel on Wednesday blamed bad coordination as well as dithering by national governments and international organisations for the failure to tackle Covid-19 before it became a full-blown pandemic, as India’s death toll topped 250,000.
India added a record 4,205 deaths to its Covid-19 toll in the past 24 hours, with the variant stoking the country’s surge now present in dozens of other countries across the globe.
Looking back to the earliest days of the pandemic, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) blamed a “toxic cocktail” of dithering and poor coordination for the more than 3.3 million deaths so far and untold economic damage.