GENEVA (AP) – A panel of experts commissioned by the World Health Organization has criticized China and other countries for not making an earlier effort to stop the first outbreak of the coronavirus and wondered if the UN health agency had it as a pandemic earlier must label.
In a report released to the media on Monday, the panel headed by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said there were “missed opportunities” to implement basic public health measures as early as possible. to put.
“What is clear to the panel is that public health measures could have been more vigorously applied by local and national health authorities in China in January,” he said.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying disputed whether China had responded too slowly.
“As the first country to raise the global alarm against the epidemic, China made immediate and decisive decisions,” she said, noting that Wuhan – where the first human cases were identified – was incarcerated within three weeks of the outbreak starting.
“All countries, not just China, but the US, UK, Japan or other countries should all try to do better,” said Hua.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson Sirleaf said it was up to countries to overhaul the WHO to give it more authority to fight outbreaks, and said the organization was also constrained by the lack of funding.
“The bottom line is, the WHO has no powers to enforce anything,” she said. “All it can do is ask to be invited in.”
Last week, an international team of WHO-led scientists arrived in Wuhan to investigate the animal origins of the pandemic after months of political bickering to secure China’s approval for the probe.
The panel also cited evidence from cases in other countries in late January, saying that measures to limit public health should have been taken immediately in any country with a probable case, adding, “They weren’t.”
The experts also wondered why the WHO had not previously declared a global public health emergency – the highest alert for outbreaks. The UN health agency convened its emergency committee on January 22, but did not characterize the emerging pandemic as an international emergency until a week later.
“Another question is whether it would have helped if the WHO had used the word pandemic earlier,” the panel said.
The WHO only described the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, weeks after the virus started causing explosive outbreaks across many continents, according to the WHO’s own definition of an influenza pandemic.
As the coronavirus started to spread around the world, top WHO experts disputed how contagious the virus was, saying it was not as contagious as flu and that people without symptoms rarely spread the virus. Scientists have since concluded that COVID-19 is transmitted even faster than flu and that a significant portion of the spread comes from people who don’t appear to be sick.
The WHO has been heavily criticized in the past year for how they deal with the response to COVID-19. US President Donald Trump condemned the UN health agency for “ collusion ” with China to cover up the magnitude of the initial outbreak before stopping US funding for the WHO and pulling the country out of the organization.
The UN health agency bowed to international pressure at its member states’ annual meeting last spring by establishing the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The WHO chief has appointed Johnson Sirleaf and Clark – both previously associated with the UN agency – to lead the team.
An Associated Press investigation found in June that the WHO repeatedly publicly praised China, while officials personally complained that Chinese officials were holding on to share crucial epidemic information with them.
While the panel concluded that “many countries have taken minimal measures to prevent the spread (of COVID-19) internally and internationally,” it did not name specific countries. It also declined to call the WHO for not criticizing countries more sharply instead of praising countries for their response efforts.
Last month, the author of a retracted WHO report on Italy’s pandemic response said he warned his bosses in May that people could die and that the agency could suffer “ catastrophic ” reputational damage if it allowed political concerns to suppress the document , according to emails obtained by the AP.
To date, the pandemic has killed more than 2 million people worldwide.
___
AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng reported from Toronto. Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s full pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak