GENEVA (AP) – When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on Thursday a year ago, it did so only after weeks of resisting the deadline and maintaining that the highly infectious virus could still be stopped. .
A year later, the United Nations agency continues to fight to keep up with the evolution of COVID-19 science, to convince countries to abandon their nationalist tendencies and to help get vaccines where more they need them.
The agency made some costly advances along the way: it discouraged people from wearing masks for months and claimed the COVID-19 was not widespread in the air. He also refused to publicly call on countries, especially China, for mistakes that senior WHO officials complained about in private.
This created a complicated policy that challenged the credibility of the WHO and united it between two world powers, prompting criticism from the Trump administration that came out of the agency.
President Joe Biden’s support for the WHO may provide some much-needed breathing space, but the organization still faces a monumental task as it seeks to project some moral authority in the midst of a universal struggle for the vaccines that leave billions of people unprotected.
“The WHO has lagged behind a bit, being cautious rather than preventive,” said Gian Luca Burci, a former WHO legal adviser at the Geneva Postgraduate Institute. “In times of panic, crisis and so on, maybe it would have been better to be risky, to take a risk.”
The WHO waved its first major warning flag on January 30, 2020, calling the outbreak an international health emergency. But many countries ignored or ignored the warning.
Only when WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a “pandemic” six weeks later, on March 11, 2020, did most governments take action, experts said. By then it was too late and the virus had spread to all continents except Antarctica.
A year later, the WHO is still paralyzed. A WHO-led team that traveled to China in January to investigate the origins of COVID-19 was criticized for not rejecting China’s marginal theory that the virus could spread through contaminated frozen seafood. .
This came after the WHO repeatedly praised China last year for its quick and transparent response, despite recordings of private meetings obtained by The Associated Press. showed that senior officials were frustrated by the country’s lack of cooperation.
“Everyone has wondered why the WHO praised China so much in January ‘2020, ‘” Burci said, adding that the praise has again “haunted the WHO to a great extent.”
Some experts say WHO’s mistakes cost a lot and still depend too much on iron-clad science instead of taking calculated risks to keep people safer, either in strategies like wearing masks or if often the COVID-19 extends through the air.
“Without a doubt, the WHO’s failure to approve masks earlier cost lives,” said Dr Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care health sciences at Oxford University, who is part of several WHO committees of experts. It won’t be until June did the WHO advise people to wear masks regularly, long after other health agencies and many countries did?
Greenhalgh said she was less interested in asking the WHO to atone for past mistakes than to review its policies in the future. In October, he wrote to the head of a key WHO committee on infection control, raising concerns about the lack of experience of some members. He never received a response.
“This scandal is not just in the past. It’s in the present and it increases in the future, ”Greenhalgh said.
Raymond Tellier, an associate professor at Canadian McGill University who specializes in coronavirus, said WHO’s constant reluctance to recognize how often COVID-19 spreads in the air could be more dangerous with the arrival of new ones. virus variants first identified in Britain and South Africa. they 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 that people in the world’s poorest countries receive doses through the COVAX initiative, which aims to ensure that poor countries receive COVID-19 vaccines.
But COVAX has only a fraction of the 2 billion vaccines expects to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that have waited months to receive shots have become impatient, who choose to sign their own private offers to access the vaccine more quickly.
WHO chief Tedros has responded largely by calling on countries to act in “solidarity”, warning that the world is on the brink of “catastrophic moral failure”. if vaccines are not distributed fairly. Although he has asked rich countries no one has forced it to share its doses immediately with developing countries and not reach new agreements that would jeopardize the supply of vaccines to the poorest countries.
“The WHO tries to address itself by moral authority, but repeating over and over again ‘solidarity’ when countries ignore them for acting in their own interest shows that they do not recognize reality,” said Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for a Global Development. “The time has come to summon things as they are.”
Yet throughout the pandemic, the WHO has repeatedly refused to censor rich countries for their flawed attempts to stop the virus. Internally, they described WHO officials some of their larger countries ’approaches to making COVID-19“ an unfortunate laboratory for studying the virus ”and“ macabre ”.
More recently, Tedros seems to have found a slightly firmer voice that speaks truth to leaders like the German president about the need for rich countries to share vaccines or criticize China for dragging its heels into not quickly granting visas. to the WHO-led research team.
Irwin Redlener of Columbia University said the WHO should be more aggressive in instructing countries what to do, given the extremely uneven way COVID-19 vaccines are distributed.
“The WHO cannot order countries to do things, but they can give very clear and explicit guidelines that make it difficult for countries not to follow up,” Redlener said.
Senior WHO officials have repeatedly said it is not the agency’s style to criticize countries.
At a press conference this month, Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior WHO adviser, simply said, “We can’t tell every country what to do.”
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AP medical writer Maria Cheng reported from London.
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