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A global panel of experts on Wednesday blamed the World Health Organization, the U. S. government, and the U. S. government. The U. S. and others for serious mistakes in coordinating a foreign reaction to COVID-19, while also presenting recommendations to oppose pandemics in the long term and rekindle disputed claims about the origins of the disease. the virus.
In a 45-page editorial, the Lancet Covid-19 Commission warned that many governments have proven to be “unreliable and ineffective” as the pandemic tears the world apart, giving examples such as richer countries accumulating doses of vaccines and refusing to fund the global reaction. efforts, and politicians like President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro downplaying the dangers of the virus, even though thousands of its citizens have died.
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“What we saw, that a cooperative global strategy, was necessarily each country alone,” Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University who chaired the commission, told reporters at a briefing organized through the prestigious medical journal. “National leaders decide. . . of the strategy and destiny of their countries in an incredibly random way. “
As a result, the virus has wreaked havoc on the world in a “very unequal” way, the panel concluded, with serious consequences for the most vulnerable, adding young people who have suffered learning losses due to interrupted schooling, other people in low-income countries forced to wait for vaccine doses, and patients suffering from ongoing pain and other physical disorders attributed to prolonged covid.
“Global and national decisions have failed to take into account the less vociferous voices of our communities: those who do not vote, such as immigrants and refugees, or those who do not have the power to voice their concerns, such as our elders. People who were too busy taking care of us, like staff and women who were on the front lines fighting the virus without professional equipment,” said Gabriela Cuevas Barrón, a Mexican politician and member of the Lancet Commission.
The Lancet report also criticizes the WHO, saying the global fitness watchdog “acted too cautiously and too slowly” on several pressing issues, such as detecting that the virus was spreading by airborne transmission. The commission calls for strengthening the UN firm by giving it more investment and authority, and also calls for the creation of a new World Health Council to help WHO make timely decisions.
In a statement, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the organization welcomed the commission’s recommendations and backed its call for more funding. But Harris warned of “various omissions and misinterpretations,” the panel had mischaracterized “the speed and scope of the WHO’s actions. “
As physical care providers around the world prepare for a third coronavirus winter, the commission argues that “globally coordinated efforts” can end the pandemic, urging a sustained method for mass vaccination, the adoption of public fitness measures such as the wearing of masks in certain contexts, Social and monetary so that the inflamed continue to isolate themselves and a real cooperation between the most influential nations of the world.
“China, the United States, the European Union, India, the Russian Federation and other major regional and global powers will have to put aside their geopolitical rivalries to work together to end this pandemic and prepare for the next and other global crises. “concludes the report.
The Lancet Commission report has no legal or regulatory authority. But their recommendations, which are based on more than two years of studies through more than 170 experts, constitute one of the highest profile attempts to identify the classes of covid-19 and how best to prepare for the next pandemic. efforts to conduct a bipartisan review of the pandemic response have stalled in Congress, and other independent donations have also struggled to secure investment or attract broad attention.
But the Lancet report also comes after Sachs, the panel’s chairman, publicly embraced the “lab leak theory,” which posits that the virus would possibly have escaped from a lab and possibly even had synthetic origins, prompting a backlash from scientists who warned that their defense of the disputed theory would make it difficult to understand the panel’s work.
Government officials like Anthony S. Fauci are “not honest” about the origins of the virus, Sachs said in an August podcast with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who spread conspiracy theories about vaccines. Sachs also co-authored a May paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that argued that American scientists possibly would have played a role in the formation of SARS-CoV-2 and called for an investigation into the origin of the pandemic through “bipartisan congressional research with full investigative powers. “”
Sachs’ plea sparked a year-long personal feud with other commission members who say there is much more evidence that the virus has a “natural origin” and was first transmitted to humans through an animal, and who worked to succeed in a compromise on what the final report would say.
“Along with a few other commissioners, I helped lead efforts to keep the absurd plot and doodle out of the final report,” said Peter Hotez, a virologist at Baylor College of Medicine and a member of the panel. disappointed if the covid origin plots end up undermining some of the valid gaps in our understanding of the emergence of SARS, MERS and covid. “
The commission’s report called for further investigation into theories of laboratory leaks and the origins of herbs, and blamed the National Institutes of Health for failing to provide more data on the U. S. government’s prospective role in the U. S. government. U. S. in investment studies on the Chinese coronavirus. rigorous work through foreign groups in virology, epidemiology, bioinformatics and other similar fields,” the report concludes.
The commissioners also called for WHO to be empowered to inspect and provide services where scientists examine and experiment with viruses that can cause potential pandemics. supervision over the “management of harmful pathogens”.
“Advances in biotechnology over the past two decades have led to the creation of new and highly harmful pathogens,” the report concludes. 19 pandemic. “
However, the report did not provide any new clinical data on the origin of the virus, and did not mention two papers recently published in the journal Science that identify that the pandemic began in a market in China, not in a laboratory.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said she found the report’s claims about the origins of the virus and increased tasks to be “terrible. “
“None of the applicable evidence has been cited, and it’s understandable why: There is a misconception that implies an equivalent probability of herbal and laboratory origin, which is totally incompatible with our existing clinical understanding,” Rasmussen said. “It’s hard not to think that this omission is intentional to recommend that the ‘lab leak’ is more credible than it is, as well as to promote the totally unfounded and unfounded view that the pandemic is the result of a so-called ‘gain of function’ quest. and there is a conspiracy involving the Chinese government and the NIH to cover it up. “
The latest report comes after more than two dozen experts claimed in The Lancet in February 2020 that it was a “conspiracy theory” to take into account that covid-19 had leaked from a lab. Since then, the publication and those authors have faced scrutiny that it was caused by scientists seeking to anticipate research in their own research.
The Lancet report also draws on long-standing principles of foreign development, saying that universal health policy and an increased amount of money for foreign health efforts would provide mandatory protections against new emerging infectious diseases.
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Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post contributed to this report.
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