The world has learned little from the coronavirus pandemic – and we are not using what we did gain to prevent or deal with another one, a panel convened by the World Health Organization said this week.
Globally, we are “woefully” unprepared for the next pandemic, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response said Wednesday, presenting a report commissioned by WHO a year ago.
This is not for lack of understanding of what to do, nor is it about the severity of the next pathogen, they said. It’s simply because for some reason there is not enough political will.
“If there were a new pandemic threat this year, next year, or the year after at least, we will be largely in the same place,” said panel co-chair and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark. “Maybe worse, given the tight fiscal space of many, if not most, countries right now.”
More than a million people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. alone, and the number globally has topped 6 million, according to Johns Hopkins University. New variants are fueling a current rise in U.S. cases, and those will not stop evolving any time soon, the panel noted.
We have the same toolset we did at the end of 2019, and that proved inadequate, Clark said, and not just because of the tools themselves.
“The weak links that we identified then still exist today, and without more concrete efforts to fix them, we could find ourselves once again scrambling to protect people from a new pandemic threat,” she said in the statement.
While some progress has been made, it was not enough to defeat the next pathogen, they said in the report, Transforming or Tinkering? Inaction Lays the Groundwork for Another Pandemic.
Among other measures, WHO funding was increased; G20 states pledged to create a new pandemic fund to be housed at the World Bank and enhance global security, and an international partnership has delivered 1.5 billion vaccine doses and other tools to lower-income nations.
However, it’s a patchwork of measures that does not comprise a “cohesive transformed system,” the group said. Government heads of state must step up.
“While there are laudable efforts to better protect everyone from the current and next pandemic threat, these remain slow, fragmented, too focused on bureaucratic processes and not enough on results,” former Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who co-chaired the panel, said in a statement.
The panel recommended an urgent overhaul of the international health system and said that even with the current roadmap and expertise, the world is just a hair more able to handle a new health threat than it was before the coronavirus pandemic, the team said.
“Current institutions, public and private, failed to protect people from a devastating pandemic,” the group said. “Without change, they will not prevent a future one.”
