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
Global health system ‘unfit’ for purpose and major reform needed, concludes independent review
12 May 2021 • 11:00am
The Chinese army had already deployed medical specialists to Wuhan by the end of January, the epicentre of a spiralling viral outbreak that had killed 41 people, but a ‘lost’ month at the start of the crisis led to indecision and complacency in the rest of the world
Credit: HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images
The worst ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic could have been avoided had the world not “lost” a month at the start of the crisis to indecision and complacency, concludes the first major independent review of the crisis.