GENEVA (AP) – When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus pandemic a year ago on Thursday, it did so only after weeks of resisting the deadline and saying the highly infectious 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 tendencies and help get vaccines where they are most needed.
The agency made several costly mistakes along the way: it advised people not to wear masks for months and said that COVID-19 was not widely spread in the air. He also refused to publicly call on countries – especially China – for mistakes that senior WHO officials have privately groped.
This created a difficult policy, which challenged the credibility of the WHO and incorporated it between two world powers, triggering vocal criticism from the Trump administration from which the agency is only now emerging.
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 project moral authority amid a universal vaccine fight that leaves billions unprotected.
“The WHO has lagged behind, being cautious rather than preventive,” said Gian Luca Burci, a former WHO legal adviser now at the Geneva Graduate Institute. “In times of panic, crisis and so on, maybe it would have been better to be more in your arms – to take risks.”
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 ignored the warning.
Only when WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a “pandemic” six weeks later, on March 11, 2020, most governments took action, experts said. By then, it was too late, and the virus had spread to all continents except Antarctica.
A year later, the WHO still appears in parallel. A WHO-led team that traveled to China in January to investigate the origins of COVID-19 has been criticized for not rejecting China’s marginal theory that the virus could be spread through contaminated frozen seafood.
This came after the WHO repeatedly praised China last year for its quick and transparent response – even though recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press he said senior officials were frustrated by the country’s lack of co-operation.
“Everyone wondered why the WHO praised China so loudly in January 2020,” Burci said, adding that the praise returned “to haunt the WHO at a great distance.”
Some experts say WHO’s mistakes have come at a high price and remain too dependent on iron-clad science instead of taking calculated risks to keep people safe – whether it’s strategies like masking or whether COVID-19 is often spread through the air.
“Undoubtedly, the failure of the WHO to approve masks costs lives earlier,” said Dr Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary health sciences at Oxford University who is a member of several WHO expert committees. Only in June Has the WHO advised people to wear masks regularly, long after other health agencies and many countries have done so?
Greenhalgh said she was less interested in asking WHO to atone for past mistakes than to review its policies in the future. In October, she wrote to the head of a key WHO infection control committee, raising concerns about the lack of expertise of some members. He never received an answer.
“It simply came to our notice then. It’s in the present and it’s climbing in the future, “said Greenhalgh.
Raymond Tellier, an associate professor at McGill University in Canada who specializes in coronaviruses, said WHO’s continued reluctance to recognize how often COVID-19 spreads in the air could prove more dangerous with the arrival of new virus variants. first identified in the UK and South Africa. are even more transmissible.
“If the WHO recommendations are not strong enough, we could see that the pandemic continues much longer,” he said.
With more vaccines licensed, WHO is now working to ensure that people in the world’s poorest countries receive doses through the COVAX initiative, which aims to ensure poor countries receive COVID-19 vaccines.
But COVAX has only a fraction of the 2 billion vaccines hopes to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that have been waiting for months for gunfire have become impatient, choosing to sign their own private offers for faster access to the vaccine.
WHO chief Tedros responded largely by calling on countries to act in “solidarity”, warning that the world is on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure” if the vaccines are not distributed correctly. Although he asked the rich countries no one was forced to immediately share doses with developing countries and not to conclude new agreements that would jeopardize the supply of vaccines to poorer countries.
“WHO tries to lead by moral authority, but repeating ‘solidarity’ several times when it is ignored by countries acting in its 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 shout things as they are.”
However, throughout the pandemic, the WHO has repeatedly refused to censor rich countries for their failed attempts to stop the virus. Internally, WHO officials described some of the biggest approaches by Member States to determine COVID-19 as “an unfortunate laboratory to study the virus” and “macabre”.
More recently, Tedros seems to have found a slightly firmer voice – speaking to the truth of leaders, such as the German president, about the need for rich countries to share vaccines or criticize China for dragging its heel into not issuing visas quickly. to the WHO-led investigation team.
Irwin Redlener of Columbia University said WHO should be more aggressive in instructing countries on what to do, given the extremely uneven distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
“WHO cannot order countries to do things, but they can make very clear and explicit guidelines that make it difficult for countries not to follow,” Redlener said.
Senior WHO officials have repeatedly said it is not the agency’s style to criticize countries.
At a press briefing this month, WHO Senior Adviser Dr Bruce Aylward said simply, “We can’t tell individual countries what to do.”
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AP medical writer Maria Cheng reported from London.
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