How to stop the next pandemic? WHO panel advises

How will the world prevent the next pandemic? For starters… learning from the mistakes of this one.

A World Health Organization review panel on Wednesday said a new global system should be set up to respond faster to disease outbreaks, which could ensure that no future virus causes a pandemic as devastating as COVID-19.

The panel said the WHO should be empowered to send investigators to swiftly chase down new disease outbreaks and to publish their full findings without delay.

Panel co-chair and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: “This is an ongoing disaster that we believe could have been prevented. The evidence shows that an outbreak became a pandemic because of failures, gaps, and delays in preparedness and response.”

In a new report titled, “COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic”, the panel outlined critical errors made by countries in early 2020 – including a delay in declaring an emergency, a failure to impose travel restrictions and an entire "lost month" when countries neglected to respond to warnings.

When the WHO's Emergency Committee met on Jan. 22, it stopped short of declaring an international health emergency. That declaration did not come until eight days later, costing crucial time.

Governments, meanwhile, failed to grasp that the emergency declaration was the WHO's "loudest possible alarm.”

The panel did not lay specific blame on China for its actions in the early days of the pandemic, or on the WHO’s director-general, accused by the United States under then-President Donald Trump of being too deferential to Beijing.

Health ministers will debate the findings at the WHO's annual assembly opening on May 24th.