The Atlantic
And points to how we prevent the next pandemic.
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Chinatopix / AP
By early February 2020, China had effectively locked down tens of millions of its citizens. Entire hospitals were sprouting from scratch to cope with an onslaught of coronavirus cases there. The World Health Organization had just declared that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus was a “public health emergency of international concern.” And on February 7, I went on a radio show and spent much of the segment discussing the economic implications of the ordeal for East Asia.
I often think about that segment now and wonder how I could have been so unimaginative. I was so focused on the desperate scenes in China that I failed to consider that similar scenes could soon transpire around the world. Why didn’t I grab the mic, dispense with the usual commentary, and issue an urgent plea for the world to wake up?
Robert F. Bukaty/AP
New Zealanders will be inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine, but has millions more vaccines from other manufacturers on order. (File photo)
Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has called on New Zealand to send its millions of extra Covid-19 doses on order to poor countries that are being ravaged by the virus. New Zealand has enough doses to vaccinate the population nearly four times over. As well as the 10 million Pfizer doses, enough for the entire population of five million, there are enough Novavax, Janssen and Astrazeneca doses on order to inoculate 14.16m people. “Our call to every high-income country like New Zealand, which has ordered significantly more than it can conceivably use, is get it back in the pool,” she told
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
Credit: Getty
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.