GENEVA (AP) – When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on Thursday a year ago, it did so after weeks of opposition to the term and insisting that the highly contagious virus could still be stopped.
A year later, the UN agency is still struggling to keep up with the evolving science of COVID-19, to persuade countries to give up their nationalist leanings and help get vaccines where they are needed most.
The agency made some costly missteps along the way: It discouraged people from wearing masks for months and claimed that COVID-19 was not widespread in the air. It also refused to publicly call out to countries – China in particular – for mistakes that senior WHO officials privately grumbled about.
That created a tricky policy that questioned the credibility of the WHO and trapped it between two world powers, leading to vocal criticism of the Trump administration that the agency is only now coming out of.
President Joe Biden’s support for the WHO may provide much-needed breathing space, but the organization still faces a monumental task as it seeks to show some moral authority amid a universal battle for vaccines that is leaving billions of people unprotected.
“The WHO is a little behind and is more cautious than precautionary,” said Gian Luca Burci, former WHO legal adviser, now at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. “In times of panic, crisis and so on, it might have been better to be more on your feet – take a risk.”
The WHO waved its first major warning flag on January 30, 2020, calling the outbreak an international health emergency. But many countries have ignored or overlooked the warning.
It wasn’t until WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a “pandemic” six weeks later, on March 11, 2020, that most governments took action, experts said. By then it was too late and the virus had reached every continent except Antarctica.
A year later, the WHO still seems paralyzed. A WHO-led team that traveled to China in January to investigate the origin of COVID-19 was criticized for not rejecting China’s marginal theory that the virus could be spread through tainted frozen seafood.
That came after the WHO repeatedly praised China last year for its quick, transparent response – although recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed that top officials were frustrated with the country’s lack of cooperation.
“Everyone has wondered why the WHO praised China so much in January 2020,” Burci said, adding that the praise has come back “to haunt the WHO in grand ways.”
Some experts say WHO’s blunders come at a high price, and that it remains too dependent on iron science rather than taking calculated risks to keep people safer – be it strategies like wearing a mask or that COVID-19 is often spread through the air.
“There is no doubt that the WHO’s failure to approve masks has previously cost lives,” said Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, professor of primary health sciences at the University of Oxford, who is a member of several WHO expert committees. Not until June WHO advised people to wear masks regularly, long after other health authorities and numerous countries did.
Greenhalgh said she was less interested in asking WHO to fine for past mistakes than reviewing its policies in the future. In October, she wrote at the head of a major WHO infection control committee, expressing concerns about the lack of expertise among some members. She never got a response.
“This scandal is not only a thing of the past. It’s in the present and escalating into the future, ”said Greenhalgh.
Raymond Tellier, associate professor at Canada’s McGill University who specializes in coronaviruses, said WHO’s continued reluctance to recognize how often COVID-19 is spread in the air could prove more dangerous with the advent of new virus variants that were first identified in Great Britain and South Africa that are even more transferable.
“If the WHO recommendations are not strong enough, we could see the pandemic last much longer,” he said.
With several approved vaccines, the WHO is now working to ensure that people in the world’s poorest countries receive doses through the COVAX initiative, which aims to get poor countries to receive COVID-19 vaccines.
But COVAX only has a fraction of the 2 billion vaccines it hopes to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that have been waiting months for shots have become impatient, choose to sign their own private contracts for faster access to vaccines.
WHO chief Tedros has largely responded by calling on countries to act in “solidarity” by warning that the world is on the verge of a “catastrophic moral failure.” when vaccines are not distributed fairly. Although he has asked rich countries no one has made an obligation to immediately share their doses with developing countries and not negotiate new deals that would endanger the vaccine supply for poorer countries.
“WHO tries to lead by moral authority but repeats ‘solidarity’ time and again when ignored by countries acting in their own interest shows that they do not recognize reality,” said Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for Global Development. “It’s time to call things what they are.”
Yet during the pandemic, the WHO has repeatedly refused to condemn rich countries for failing to stop the virus. Internally described WHO officials some of the approaches taken by their largest member states to label COVID-19 as ‘an unfortunate laboratory to study the virus’ and ‘macabre’.
More recently, Tedros seems to have found a slightly firmer voice – speaking the truth to leaders such as the President of Germany about the need for rich countries to share vaccines or criticize China for not issuing visas quickly. to the WHO-led research team.
Columbia University’s Irwin Redlener said WHO should be more aggressive in instructing countries what to do, given the extremely uneven way COVID-19 vaccines are distributed.
“The WHO cannot direct countries to do things, but they can give very clear and explicit guidelines that make it difficult for countries not to follow them,” said Redlener.
Top WHO officials have repeatedly said that it is not the style of the agency to criticize countries.
At a press conference this month, Dr. Bruce Aylward, WHO’s senior advisor, put it simply: “We cannot tell individual countries what to do.”
AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng reported from London.
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