International public health panel sharply criticizes political leaders for slow response to coronavirus pandemic

Panel blasts COVID-19 response: 'Global political leadership was absent' A prominent panel of political and public health leaders has blasted the international and national response to the coronavirus pandemic, labeling slow and tepid reactions around the world as a Reid Wilson TheHill

A prominent panel of political and public health leaders has blasted the international and national response to the coronavirus pandemic, labeling slow and tepid reactions around the world as a preventable disaster that cost millions of lives.

In a report issued Wednesday, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response called on wealthier countries to do more to help the world end the pandemic and to bolster the global health systems meant to act as a frontline defense to prevent future outbreaks.

“Covid-19 remains a global disaster. Worse, it was a preventable disaster,” the report says.

It is clear, the report found, that the world was not prepared, even after decades of warnings that a serious pathogen was poised to sweep the globe.

“The Independent Panel has found weak links at every point in the chain of preparedness and response. Preparation was inconsistent and underfunded. The alert system was too slow — and too meek,” the panelists wrote. “Global political leadership was absent.”

The panel, brought together by the World Health Organization, was led by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia, and Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand. Both former leaders have extensive experience in international organizations, Sirleaf at the World Bank and Clark at the United Nations.

The report praised clinicians on the ground in Wuhan, China, who identified what they believed was a novel pathogen in December 2019. But it criticized the formal procedures for alerting other nations, an implicit rebuke of China’s early moves to downplay the severity of the virus and to censure those who sounded the alarm, costing the world valuable time to prepare.

Even after the World Health Organization itself issued a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the highest level of warning it can offer, “too many countries took a ‘wait and see’ approach rather than enacting an aggressive containment strategy that could have forestalled the global pandemic,” the report says. ...

ALSO SEE: How can we stop the next pandemic? Here's what a WHO panel recommends