What went wrong? 13 mistakes that plunged the world into the coronavirus crisis
From a slow global alert system to geopolitical squabbles, a damning review identified 13 failures that turned an outbreak into a pandemic
12 May 2021 • 11:00am
The report sets out a range of recommendations to better prepare for emerging health threats
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A major review analysing the global response to the coronavirus outbreak has delivered a damning verdict: the international health system was “clearly unfit” to prevent the pandemic, and needs radical reforms to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
In an 86-page report, supported by a raft of supplementary annexes, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) – led by two former heads of governments and a host of international experts – sets out a range of recommendations to better prepare for emerging health threats.
Boxes containing shipments of the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine are unloaded from air shipping containers in Louisville, Ky.
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The Covid-19 crisis should serve as a “Chernobyl moment” for global pandemic preparedness, triggering a series of actions to speed the end of this pandemic and to ensure it’s the last of its kind the world ever faces, according to a report from an international panel of experts.
The report by the panel, which was established at the behest of member states of the World Health Organization, calls on wealthy countries with Covid vaccine to share their supplies in large volumes and quickly, with 1 billion doses donated by September and another 1 billion by the end of the year. The report calls for swift negotiations to lift intellectual property protections for Covid vaccines and an automatic waiver if the negotiations fail to deliver within three months.
To do better next time, the group proposes a top-to-bottom overhaul of the pandemic preparedness system, including the creation of a new global health council akin to the United Nations Security Council and more money and power for the World Health Organization (WHO). “Pandemics pose potential existential threats to humanity and must be elevated to the highest level,” the authors write.
“It s a frank assessment of literally systematic failure in the COVID response at every level, from WHO down to country level,” says Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. But Gostin says the panel is vague on how to bring about the massive changes it seeks and has missed an opportunity to call out countries bad behavior, including China’s early handling of the outbreak. “The independent panel had the opportunity to give WHO political cover to name names, to identify fault, honestly, where it occurs. And they didn
The report, by The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, said the resources and know-how to control the coronavirus existed all along but world leaders failed to use them properly.
It noted that the experience of previous pandemics could have helped but was not put to proper use. The full 86-page report can be found here.
International systems and institutions failed to protect us, concluded Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the chair of the panel and a former president of Liberia.
The world would have avoided the catastrophe we are in today if experts had learned from previous health crises, Johnson Sirleaf said.