WHO should have declared Covid-19 an emergency much before, lost a month due to it: Panel report
India TodayA new transparent global system should be set up for probing disease outbreaks, empowering the World Health Organization to deploy investigators at short-notice and reveal findings, a Covid-19 pandemic review panel said on Wednesday. The WHO should have declared the new coronavirus outbreak in China an international emergency earlier than January 30, 2020, but the next month was "lost" as countries failed to take strong measures to halt spread of the respiratory pathogen, it said. "It is critical to have an empowered WHO," panel co-chair and former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark told reporters on the launch of the report "COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic". "It is glaringly obvious to the Panel that February 2020 was a lost month, when steps could and should have been taken to curtail the epidemic and forestall the pandemic," it said. "If such an agreement can't be hammered out within three months, then a TRIPS waiver should apply immediately," Clark said, referring to the WTO's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.