Radical vision unveiled to make Covid-19 the world’s last pandemic

Multibillion dollar response mechanism and global cooperation treaty among key recommendations to prevent next outbreak

Former leaders, diplomats and aid agency heads deliver their report on what went wrong and how to fix it

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A panel of former world leaders has made a series of recommendations to avoid the tragedy of future pandemics. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:00pm, 12 May 2021Updated: 6:00pm, 12 May 2021

A radical rewrite of the global framework to prevent and respond to health threats is needed to make Covid-19 “the last pandemic”, according to a group of former world leaders and experts.

“Our message is simple and clear – the current system failed to protect us from the Covid-19 pandemic. And if we do not act to change it now, it will not protect us from the next pandemic threat, which could happen at any time,” said former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Alongside former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, Sirleaf co-chaired a panel of 13 experts charged by World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with working out how a disease outbreak in China became a global crisis. The group’s members included former leaders, diplomats, and aid organisation heads from countries such as the US, China, Saudi Arabia and India.

After an eight-month evaluation, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response has delivered its report, headlining its recommendations with a call to establish a multibillion dollar financing mechanism to prepare and respond to pandemics, as well as a permanent council of world leaders focused on global health threats, and a pandemic treaty.

The panel wants a new and transparent system to detect and monitor outbreaks around the world, along with a strengthening of the WHO’s purse and powers. And it said world leaders should commit to these reforms at a UN summit in four months’ time.

“We say that half-measures won’t do, if the world is going to avert another catastrophe like Covid-19,” Clark said.