The world is still “at the beginning” of the coronavirus pandemic, which can be expected to get nastier as the second wave develops in Europe, a medical expert has told MPs.
David Nabarro, who is one of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) special envoys on Covid-19, told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee that Covid had got so “out of control” it now threatened a global economic contraction in a situation “much worse” than anything from a science fiction film.
And he scornfully dismissed reported claims from US secretary of state Mike Pompeo that the WHO’s approach to the outbreak was biased because its director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had been secretly "bought" by China.
Giving evidence by video link, the co-director of Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation was asked what response he would give to people who played down the significance of Covid-19 or blamed it on a conspiracy designed to make them take vaccines.
Dr Nabarro told MPs: “None of us find the present situation anything other than horrible grotesque, really embarrassing.
“It’s a terrible situation, a health issue that has got so out of control it’s knocking the world into, not just a recession, but a huge economic contraction which will probably double the number of poor people, double the number of malnourished, lead to hundreds of millions of small businesses going bankrupt and generally wreck the destination for a lot of young people who are not going to get educational opportunity.”
Dr Nabarro said: “It’s awful. And we really, really are, all of us, deeply saddened and troubled by it.
“That applies to most people in our world who are all having to make sense of something that they couldn’t imagine.
“It’s much worse than any of the science fiction about pandemics.
“This is really serious – we’re not even at the middle of it yet. We’re still at the beginning of it.
“And we’re beginning to see what damage it’s going to cause the world.
“And it’s getting nastier as we go into this particular phase in Europe of watching the thing come back again.”
Dr Nabarro said that he understood why people grasped at conspiracy theories, as everyone would love to find a convenient explanation for the virus.
He added: “I think we’ve got to entertain the fact that everybody everywhere is looking for an explanation, and we need to level with them and say ‘we quite understand it’.
“We know how absolutely awful this is for so many hundreds of millions of people.
“Based on my understanding, this virus was visited on us at the very end of last year, and we’ve been learning to live with it for this year, and we will make sense of it, and we will be able to work out how to do it, but it’s going to take us quite a bit longer.”
Asked about the attacks on the WHO by members of Donald Trump’s administration including Mr Pompeo, Dr Nabarro said: “I want to really, really stress that this is an organisation whose values are global, are for equity and for justice and the people working there are all in that vein.
“I have seen absolutely no evidence of anybody - particularly in emergencies programme because they're just such such amazingly committed people - showing any of the kind of bias claimed. I do not recognise what the secretary of state said when he made those comments.”
