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

A new transparent global system should be set up for probing disease outbreaks, empowering the World Health Organization to deploy investigators at short-notice and reveal findings, a Covid-19 pandemic review panel said on Wednesday.

The WHO should have declared the new coronavirus outbreak in China an international emergency earlier than Jan. 30, 2020, but the next month was "lost" as countries failed to take strong measures to halt spread of the respiratory pathogen, it said.

The independent experts, in a major report on the handling of the pandemic, called for bold WHO reforms and revitalising national preparedness plans to prevent another "toxic cocktail".

"It is critical to have an empowered WHO," panel co-chair and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark told reporters on the launch of the report "Covid-19: Make it the Last Pandemic".

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Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, said: "We are calling for a new surveillance and alert system that is based on transparency and allows WHO to publish information immediately."

Health ministers will debate the findings at WHO's annual assembly opening on May 24. Diplomats say the European Union is driving reform efforts at the U.N. agency that will take time.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, was allowed to evolve into a "catastrophic pandemic" that has killed more than 3.4 million people and devastated the world economy, the report said.

"The situation we find ourselves in today could have been prevented," said Johnson Sirleaf. "It is due to a myriad of failures, gaps and delays in preparedness and response."

Chinese doctors reported cases of unusual pneumonia in December 2019 and informed authorities, while WHO picked up reports from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control and others, the panel said.

But WHO's Emergency Committee should have declared an international health emergency at its first meeting on Jan. 22 instead of waiting until January 30, the report said.

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That committee did not recommend travel restrictions, due to WHO's International Health Regulations which need revamping, it said.

"If travel restrictions had been imposed more quickly, more widely, again that would have been a serious inhibition on the rapid transmission of the disease and that remains the same today," Clark said.

'A lost month'

Governments failed to grasp that the emergency declaration was WHO's "loudest possible alarm" and that it has no authority to declare a pandemic, although it eventually described it that way on March 11, the report added.

"It is glaringly obvious to the Panel that February 2020 was a lost month, when steps could and should have been taken to curtail the epidemic and forestall the pandemic," it said.

Instead of preparing their hospitals for Covid-19 patients, many countries engaged in a "winner takes all" scramble for protective equipment and medicines, it said.

The panel praised the "unstinting" efforts of WHO leadership and staff during the pandemic. It did not lay specific blame on China or on WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, whom the Trump administration accused of being "China-centric", a charge he denied.

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But it said that a WHO director-general should be limited to a single seven-year term, to avoid political pressure.

The WHO and World Trade Organization should convene governments and drugmakers to hammer out an agreement on voluntary licensing and technology transfers to boost vaccine production, the report said.

"If such an agreement can't be hammered out within three months, then a TRIPS waiver should apply immediately," Clark said, referring to the WTO's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.

Noting the Biden's administration backing last week for a waiver, she added: "Obviously we're very encouraged by the momentum for negotiation of a waiver at TRIPS."