ROME (AP) – Author of report withdrawn by World Health Organization in response to coronavirus in Italy warns leaders in May that people could die and UN agency could suffer reputational damage “catastrophic” if allowed for political concerns to delete the document, according to e-mails seen by The Associated Press.
The comprehensive report examined how the Italian government and the health care system reacted after the country became the epicenter of the European outbreak in late February – with real-time data and case studies on what worked and what was not intended to help. other countries to prepare for the spread of the virus.
The agency took it down a day after it was posted on its website, prompting the official who coordinated the work to appeal directly to WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on May 28 and warn that the report’s disappearance undermines WHO’s credibility. He warned that any further attempts at censorship would compromise the agency’s independence and its relations with the donor nations that funded the research.
Manipulating the report could cause a “huge scandal – at a delicate time for the UN health agency with the forthcoming COVID-19 investigation,” wrote Francesco Zambon, WHO’s main coordinator for Italy and its regions during the pandemic.
WHO did not immediately respond to a request, sent late Friday, for comments on Zambon’s e-mail to headquarters.
The report, written by Zambon and a team of WHO experts and consultants in the field of public health, was posted on May 13 after receiving the necessary approvals under the UN system, according to internal WHO documents seen by the PA. The agency later said it had been withdrawn due to “factual inaccuracies”, which it did not detail, and denied receiving any pressure from the Italian government to remove it.
In the face of criticism that the report deprived countries of data that could have helped them avoid Italy’s fate, the WHO said on Monday that it had provided another “mechanism” for assessing pandemic responses. But this was not released until two months after the report was extracted.
Concerns about the missing report have risen in recent weeks, fueling criticism of WHO’s leadership over the global pandemic response that has led the agency to agree to an independent survey of its performance..
The UN agency did not want to publicly criticize countries that are top donors, even when their policies could undermine public health.
For example, in the early stages of the January outbreak, WHO officials were privately frustrated by the lack of information. being shared by China, but publicly praised the country for its transparency. As the pandemic picks up in Europe, WHO scientists have questioned Britain’s policies – such as when he suggested that he would pursue the “immunity of the flock” – but publicly stressed their support.
The missing report drew attention to the training in Italy, where the deadliest outbreak in Europe took place. In the heavily affected province of Bergamo, prosecutors confiscated it as part of their investigation into what did not work well.
Paradoxically, the report is not even particularly critical of the Italian government and officials accredited for their efforts, praising at one point how they countered with data “sensational disagreements in talk shows” that aroused anxiety.
The text noted that the Italian Ministry of Health had not updated its 2006 pandemic influenza preparedness plan. The 2006 plan was only “reconfirmed” in 2016-2017 without being updated and was “more theoretical than practical”.
“Unprepared for such a flood of seriously ill patients, the initial reaction of the hospitals was improvised, chaotic and creative,” the report said. “It took some time for formal guidance to become available.”
Italy’s RAI investigative report released emails showing that a senior WHO official, Raniero Guerra, who had worked with the Italian government during the pandemic, told Zambon to “correct” the fact. that Italy’s training plan was “updated” in 2016, even though the 2016 version was identical to the 2006 version.
Guerra had been working on prevention in the Italian Ministry of Health from 2014 until 2017, when the plan should have been revised. He himself wrote to the then health minister saying that the plan needs to be updated, according to a copy of his 2017 memoir seen by the PA.
The WHO said the Italian government had “at no time” asked him to remove the report, which he now said he did not support. “The decision to remove the document from the site was taken by the WHO Regional Office for Europe due to factual inaccuracies,” the WHO said.
Guerra told the Financial Times not to interfere. He added that the 2006 preparedness plan did not need to be updated because no significant influenza strains had been identified at the time and that the preparedness plan was not relevant to the current pandemic because it was only meant to cover the flu.
The Deputy Minister of Health, Pierpaolo Sileri, begged not to agree. “That plan was from 2006 and needed to be updated,” Sileri told Corriere della Sera. Guerra did not immediately answer the AP’s questions, saying he was traveling.
The emails seen by the PA suggest that WHO officials were concerned that the report angered the Italians, providing rare information about the UN agency’s decision-making, which is not subject to requests for freedom of information.
In a May 13 email to Zambon, Guerra noted that Italy had just made a voluntary donation of 10 million euros ($ 12.3 million) to WHO and that negotiations between WHO and Italy to fund the agency’s office in Venice they were about to begin.
“There are already signs of institutional unrest on the part of Italy and unnecessary resentment towards the WHO,” Guerra wrote to Zambon on May 14, the day the report was extracted.
A day later, the head of WHO Europe, Dr Hans Kluge, wrote to Zambon that the “key issue” at stake in the controversy was his relationship with Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza, whom he said was “very disappointed”. ”Through the report.
The Italian government, he said, believes that “they are constantly attacked by the press and every word can be misinterpreted. They felt trampled on by a friend. ”
Kluge said he would propose to Speranza that Italian health officials be included in a review of the report. “We need the Ministry of Health (Ministry of Health) happy and to register in Venice,” he said, referring to the funding of the office.
The ministry told RAI that it did not consider the report official.
Meanwhile, Zambon warned Tedros and Kluge that lives were being endangered around the world by learning Italy’s “lessons learned”.
“A large team of experts worked literally days and nights with one motivation: making sure that what happened in Italy did not happen in those countries behind time in the epidemic curve,” Zambon Kluge wrote on May 27. “The report contains important messages, extrapolated from facts about what worked (many things) and the blind spots of the system. ”
A day later, in a message to the WHO chief, Zambon warned of a “risk of catastrophic damage to independence and transparency if a” censored “version of the above-mentioned publication, as well as relations” compromise ”with the government of Kuwait, which is one of the largest donors of the WHO and funded the research with a grant of 80 million dollars.
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AP medical writer Maria Cheng in Toronto and writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.
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