Coronavirus pandemic could be WHO’s ‘Chernobyl moment’ for reform, review panel says
- The UN health agency is underpowered, underfunded and needs fundamental changes to be able to respond more effectively to deadly disease outbreaks, group says
- China defends its early actions to fight the outbreak in response to criticism in the panel’s report
The Covid-19 pandemic could be the catalyst for much-needed reform of the World Health Organization just as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 forced urgent changes at the UN nuclear agency, an independent review panel said on Tuesday.
The panel, set up to investigate the global response to the coronavirus, said the WHO is underpowered, underfunded and required fundamental reform to give it the resources it needs to respond more effectively to deadly disease outbreaks.
“We are not here to assign blame, but to make concrete recommendations to help the world respond faster and better in future,” the panel’s co-chair, former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, told a news briefing.
The panel’s report said earlier that Chinese officials should have applied public health measures more forcefully in January to curb the initial Covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the WHO for not declaring an international emergency until January 30.
At the WHO’s Executive Board on Tuesday, China defended its early actions to fight the outbreak in the city of Wuhan and rejected some paragraphs of the panel report as being “inconsistent with the facts”.