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GENEVA (AP) – When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic a year ago on Thursday, it only did so after weeks of resisting the term and claiming that the highly infectious virus could always be stopped.
A year later, the United Nations agency is still struggling to keep abreast of the evolving science of COVID-19, persuading countries to abandon their nationalist tendencies and help obtain vaccines where they are needed most.
The agency made costly missteps along the way: It advised people against wearing masks for months and claimed COVID-19 was not widely spread in the air. He also declined to publicly call countries – especially China – for mistakes that senior WHO officials have complained about in private.
This created a delicate policy that questioned the credibility of the WHO and wedged it between two world powers, triggering sharp criticism from the Trump administration whose agency is only now emerging.
President Joe Biden’s support for the WHO may provide much-needed respite, but the organization still faces a monumental task as it attempts to project moral authority amid a global rush for vaccines that leaves billions of people without protection.
“WHO has been a little late, exercising caution rather than precaution,” said Gian Luca Burci, former WHO legal adviser now at the University Institute of Geneva. “In times of panic, crisis, etc., it might have been better to be more on one branch – to take a risk.”
WHO waved its first large warning flag on January 30, 2020, calling the epidemic an international health emergency. But many countries have ignored or neglected 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 visited 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 via fruits of contaminated frozen sea.
It came after the WHO repeatedly praised China last year for its swift and transparent response – even though tapes of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed that senior officials were frustrated with the country’s lack of cooperation.
“Everyone is wondering why the WHO praised China so much in January,” 2020, said Burci, adding that the praise had returned “to haunt the heyday of the WHO.”
Some experts say the WHO’s mistakes have come at a cost and remains too dependent on flawless science instead of taking calculated risks to keep people safer – whether on strategies like wearing masks or if COVID-19 is often spread through the air.
“Without a doubt, the failure of the WHO to approve masks sooner has cost lives,” said Dr Trish Greenhalgh, professor of health sciences in primary care at the University of Oxford who sits in several WHO expert committees. Not before 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 the WHO to right the mistakes of the past than to revise its policies in the future. In October, she wrote to the head of a key WHO committee on infection control, expressing concerns about the lack of expertise of some members. She never received a response.
“This scandal is not just a thing of the past. It’s in the present and in the future, ”Greenhalgh said.
Raymond Tellier, an associate professor at McGill University of Canada specializing in coronaviruses, said the WHO’s continued reluctance to recognize the frequency of the spread of COVID-19 in the air could prove more dangerous with the arrival of new virus variants first identified in Britain and South Africa. are even more transmissible.
“If the WHO recommendations are not strong enough, we could see the pandemic last much longer,” he said.
With several licensed vaccines, WHO is now working to ensure people in the world’s poorest countries receive doses as part of the COVAX initiative, which aims to ensure that poor countries receive COVID-19 vaccines. .
But COVAX only has a fraction of the 2 billion vaccines he hopes to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that have waited months for the shots are impatient, by choosing to sign their own private agreements for faster access to vaccines.
WHO chief Tedros has responded widely by calling on countries to act in “solidarity”, warning the world is on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure” if vaccines are not distributed equitably. Although he asked the rich countries to immediately share their doses with developing countries and not to conclude new agreements that would jeopardize the supply of vaccines to the poorest countries, none has obligated.
“WHO tries to lead by moral authority, but repeating ‘solidarity’ over and over again when it is ignored by countries acting in their own interests shows that they fail to recognize the reality,” said Amanda Glassman , Executive Vice President of the Center for Global Development. “It’s time to show things as they are.”
Yet, throughout the pandemic, the WHO has repeatedly refused to censor rich countries for their mistaken attempts to stop the virus. Internally, WHO officials described some of their larger member countries’ approaches to stemming COVID-19 as “an ill-fated lab to study the virus” and “macabre”.
More recently, Tedros seems to have found a somewhat firmer voice – telling the truth to leaders like the German president about the need for rich countries to share vaccines or criticizing China for dragging its heels by not granting quickly. visas. to the WHO-led investigation team.
Irwin Redlener of Columbia University said the WHO should be more aggressive in telling countries what to do, given the extremely uneven distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
“WHO can’t order countries to do things, but they can give very clear and explicit guidelines that prevent countries from following,” Redlener said.
Senior WHO officials have repeatedly said it is not the agency’s style to criticize countries.
At a press conference this month, WHO Senior Advisor Dr Bruce Aylward said simply: “We cannot tell every country what to do.”
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AP medical editor Maria Cheng reported from London.
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– Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic,https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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