The panel made several recommendations on how to address the current pandemic.
Geneva, Switzerland:
The catastrophic scale of the Covid-19 pandemic could have been prevented, an independent global panel concluded Wednesday, but a toxic cocktail of dithering and poor coordination meant the warning signs went unheeded.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) said a series of bad decisions meant Covid-19 went on to kill at least 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.
Panel member Michel Kazatchkine, a French diplomat and former director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, called for immediate action to ensure the world must never again face a "catastrophe" like the Covid-19 crisis.
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 t