Analysis: Lancet COVID Panel report blasts governments’ and WHO covid response

‘Untrustworthy and ineffective’: Panel blasts governments’ covid response In long-awaited report, the Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission also revives disputed claims about virus’ origins Dan Diamond Washington Post

A global panel of experts Wednesday blamed the World Health Organization, the U.S. government and others for serious failures in coordinating an international response to covid-19, while laying out recommendations to protect against future pandemics and reviving disputed claims about the virus’s origins.

In a 45-page editorial, the Lancet Covid-19 Commission warned that many governments proved “untrustworthy and ineffective” as the pandemic tore across the world, citing examples such as richer nations hoarding vaccine doses and failing to fund global response efforts, and politicians such as former U.S. president Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro playing down the virus’s risks, even as hundreds of thousands of their citizens died of it.

“What we saw — rather than a cooperative global strategy — was basically each country on its own,” Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who chaired the commission, told reporters in a briefing convened by the respected medical journal. “National leaders deciding … the strategy and the fates of their countries in an incredibly haphazard way.”

As a result, the virus ripped through the world in “highly unequal” ways, the panel concluded, with severe consequences for the most vulnerable, among them children who suffered learning losses from disrupted schooling, people in low-income nations forced to wait for vaccine doses, and patients who endure continuing pain and other health problems attributed to long covid.

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The Lancet report also criticizes the WHO, saying the global health watchdog “acted too cautiously and too slowly” on several urgent matters, such as recognizing the virus was spreading through airborne transmission. The commission calls for strengthening the United Nations agency by giving it more financing and authority, and it also urges the creation of a new global health board to help the WHO make timely decisions.

But the Lancet report also comes after Sachs, the panel’s chairman, publicly embraced the “lab-leak theory,” which posits that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory and could even have man-made origins, leading to backlash from scientists who warned that his advocacy for the disputed theory would cloud the panel’s work.

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