Clark was appointed to lead the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, along with Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia.

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The co-chairs announced their pick of 11 additional members from among those nominated by countries at the start of this month. They include China’s top Covid-19 expert Zhong Nanshan; former US ambassador Mark Dybul, who has headed the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and Preeti Sudan, former health secretary of India.

While experts say the calibre of the panel shows it has political support, it is not yet clear how far its mandate will reach in seeking answers for what went right and wrong in the global response to a health crisis that has devastated world economies, cost millions of jobs and frayed international relations.

The “scope and the limitations” of the panel’s review remain to be seen, according to Tikki Pangestu, a former WHO director of Research Policy and Cooperation.

“But the most important thing is that it provides, hopefully, an independent platform, which is not biased either toward the WHO or toward its member countries,” said Pangestu, who is a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

One unknown is the extent to which the panel will address questions about the initial handling of the outbreak after it was detected in China when there was a delay of several weeks between the announcement of an outbreak and confirmation from China that a new illness was spreading between people.

The “early phase of the pandemic – its emergence and global spread” will be among the “broad themes” of the evaluation, according to Clark, noting this would include “when and how” Covid-19 emerged.

Separately, the WHO said it would lead an international team to China for a scientific inquiry into the origins of the disease that was first identified in the city of Wuhan.

The WHO has faced criticism that it gave too much deference to China as the disease spread, a concern that was at the fore of early calls for an investigation from the United States in the lead-up to the meeting in May of the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s governing body.

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Adam Kamradt-Scott, an associate professor specialising in global health security at the University of Sydney in Australia, said it was unlikely that the independent panel would closely examine the internal actions of any one country, as this would be outside the domain of an international inquiry.

However, “how the actions of countries have served to prevent, contain or facilitate the spread of the virus internationally” could be fair game, he said.

That might include scrutinising the timeline of when Chinese leadership knew about the virus and reported it to the WHO or the health security impact of the United States’ decision this spring to pause WHO funding over concerns it pandered to China, according to Kamradt-Scott.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said he “wouldn’t be surprised if [the final report] includes candid remarks about WHO’s response, China’s response, the US response”, but any “criticism would be constructive”.

The panel chairs said they would have full access to WHO internal emails and documents to examine throughout their evaluation. Whether they could take a deep dive into how countries interacted with the WHO, reported accurate data or made internal decisions depended on nations’ own interest in sharing that information with the panel, experts said.

But while such issues may enter into the inquiry, global health experts agree that it is the role of the World Health Organisation and its ability to coordinate between countries and agencies that will be at the fore of the panel’s review.

“What is important is to see exactly what the WHO is able to do and to compare that to what WHO actually did or did not do,” said Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at Switzerland’s University of Geneva, pointing to limitations in the powers of the organisation that bind its hands in times of crisis.

Such an evaluation could help member states decide whether they would give WHO more funding or more power to be able to their meet expectations, according to Flahault.

Pangestu, the former WHO official, agrees: “At the end of the day, the panel is focused on how and what WHO can do better in the future … the way in which that can happen is [that there] needs to be more funding, more power and a reform of the structure to make [the organisation] more fit for purpose or agile.”

Analysts acknowledge that every major health crisis prompts reviews, evaluations and reports, but that recommendations are often ignored by countries or watered down in international resolutions because of a lack of consensus.

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Even as this panel races to come up with timely recommendations before an interim deadline in November and their final report, expected in May, it is possible that the same pattern will happen again.

“We’ve seen countries take these reports and stick them in their bottom drawer and not look at them again until the next global crisis comes,” Kamradt-Scott said.

But Pangestu said he was “a little bit optimistic” about what may come out of the review.

“Because Covid is so unprecedented and has hit the world so hard – not just at the level of health, but at the level of economic survival, at the level of social stability – maybe, just maybe, this time, something that’s a bit more groundbreaking can come through.”