GENEVA (AP) – A group of experts commissioned by the World Health Organization has criticized China and other countries for not moving earlier to stop the initial outbreak of the coronavirus and questioned whether the UN health agency would he had to label it earlier as a pandemic.
In a press release on Monday, the group led by former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said there were “missed opportunities” to establish basic public health measures as soon as possible. .
“What is clear to the group is that public health measures could have been enforced more forcefully by Chinese local and national health authorities in January,” he said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying disputed whether China reacted too slowly.
“As the first country to sound the global alarm against the epidemic, China has made immediate and decisive decisions,” she said, noting that Wuhan – where the first human cases were identified – was blocked within three weeks of the outbreak.
“All countries, not just China, but also the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan or any other country, should all try to do better,” Hua said.
In a press briefing on Tuesday, Johnson Sirleaf said it was up to countries if they wanted to review WHO to give more authority to eliminate outbreaks, saying the organization was also constrained by a lack of funding.
“The bottom line is that the WHO has no power to implement anything,” she said. “All he can do is ask to be invited.”
Last week, an international team of WHO-led scientists arrived in Wuhan to investigate the animal origins of the pandemic after months of political struggles to get China’s approval for the probe.
The group also cited evidence from cases in other countries in late January, saying measures to isolate public health should have been implemented immediately in any country with a probable case, adding: “They were not.” .
Experts also wondered why the WHO had not earlier declared a global public health emergency – the biggest warning 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 than it did,” the panel said.
The WHO did not describe the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic until March 11, weeks after the virus began producing explosive outbreaks on many continents, meeting the WHO’s own definition of an influenza pandemic.
As the coronavirus began to spread around the globe, top WHO experts disputed how infectious the virus was, saying it was not as contagious as the flu and that asymptomatic people rarely spread the virus. The scientists concluded that COVID-19 transmits even faster than the flu and that a significant proportion of the spread comes from people who do not appear to be ill.
In the last year, WHO has been heavily criticized for managing the response to COVID-19. US President Donald Trump has criticized the UN health agency for “collaborating” with China to cover the scale of the initial outbreak before stopping US funding for the WHO and removing the country from the organization.
The UN Health Agency bowed to international pressure at its member states’ annual meeting last spring by setting up an Independent Group on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The WHO chief called on Johnson Sirleaf and Clark – both of whom had previous ties to the UN agency – to lead the team.
An Associated Press investigation in June it found that the WHO had repeatedly praised China in public, while officials privately complained that Chinese officials had stalled in exchanging critical epidemic information with them.
Although the group concluded that “many countries have taken minimal action to prevent the spread (COVID-19) domestically and internationally”, it did not name certain countries. He also refused to call the WHO for failing to criticize countries for their mistakes instead of praising countries for their response efforts.
Last month, the author of a withdrawn 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 e-mails obtained by AP.
To date, the pandemic has killed more than 2 million people worldwide.
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AP medical writer Maria Cheng reported from Toronto. Ken Moritsugu of Beijing contributed to this report.
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