Government and WHO response to Covid was too slow, according to article

Governments and the World Health Organization (WHO) acted very slowly to stop the spread of Covid-19 and the delay resulted in millions of deaths that could have been avoided, according to an article published in the medical journal Lancet.

Widespread failures in prevention, in basic public health practices and in international solidarity have led to 17.7 million deaths, including those that have not been officially accounted for, the Lancet commission said on Wednesday as it launched its study of the pandemic. over two years.

The report concluded that the WHO “acted excessively cautiously and slowly on several important points”, including the human transmissibility of the virus and assigning the epidemic the status of an international health emergency of the highest level. To make the world aware of the problem, the WHO began qualifying the outbreak as a “pandemic” in March 2020, about three months after the first reported infection in China, but the term has no legal implications.

The world health body was also slow to support the imposition of travel restrictions to reduce transmission, to endorse the use of face masks in public spaces and to recognize airborne transmission of the virus, according to the article. The authors also concluded that coordination between governments was slow.

“The result was millions of preventable deaths and, in many countries, a reversal of progress towards sustainable development,” according to the report.

The WHO said it welcomed the report’s “comprehensive recommendations”, but that the text included “several crucial omissions and misinterpretations”, including in relation to the speed of its actions.

“Many of the commission’s recommendations coincide with those received over the past two years from review bodies created by the WHO itself,” she said.

On Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed optimism about the pandemic. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” he told a news conference, urging countries to strengthen their vaccination campaigns.

Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, who chaired the Lancet Commission, said it was time to “face hard truths”.

“Many governments have failed to adhere to basic norms of rationality and institutional transparency,” Sachs said. “Many people protested against basic public health precautions… And many nations failed to promote global collaboration to control the pandemic.”

According to the report, the pandemic exposed “important weaknesses of the UN-based multilateral system”. Still according to the text, these failures arise from problems that include excessive nationalism, a lack of flexibility around intellectual property rules, in addition to the “erosion of political support for the adoption of multilateral solutions by the great powers”.

Nationalism around vaccines was a hot topic in the early stages of the pandemic, with poorer countries accusing wealthier countries of stockpiling doses amid a shortage of supply. Although supply began to outstrip demand earlier this year, access to medicines and vaccination rates remain uneven.

Notwithstanding “great efforts” made to spur the post-Covid recovery, the insufficiently ambitious response is “like the response to other pressing global challenges”, including the climate emergency, according to the report.

“Our most fundamental recommendation is to strengthen multilateralism in all crucial dimensions: political, cultural, institutional and financial,” the authors said in the report. “We call on all countries, especially the richest and most powerful, to support, sustain and support the work of the UN system.”

Translation by Clara Allain