World dangerously unprepared for next pandemic: monitor
GENEVA, Switzerland — As the world grapples with the devastating coronavirus pandemic, it is doing far too little to prepare for future, possibly even more damaging pandemics, a global health monitor warned Monday.
In a fresh report, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), an independent body created by the World Health Organization and the World Bank, decried that the coronavirus pandemic had revealed how little the world had focused on preparing for such disasters, despite ample warnings that large disease outbreaks were inevitable.
"The COVID-19 pandemic is providing a harsh test of the world’s preparedness," the report said, concluding that little progress had been made on any of the actions it had called for in its initial report last year, before Covid-19 struck.
"Failure to learn the lessons of Covid-19 or to act on them with the necessary resources and commitment will mean that the next pandemic, which is sure to come, will be even more damaging," it warned.
Gro Harlem Brundtland, GPMB co-chair and a former WHO chief, stressed during the virtual launch of the report Monday that the board had warned a year ago that the world was ill prepared for a pandemic.
"Tragically and catastrophically we have seen our worst fears realised," she said.
"The impact of Covid-19 is even worse than we anticipated, but actions that we called for last year, have still not been taken."
The report comes as the global death toll from the novel coronavirus nears the one million-mark, out of the close to 30 million known cases since Covid-19 first emerged in China late last year.
'Panic and neglect'
Brundtland, also a former Norwegian prime minister, insisted that it was time to break the "cycle of panic and neglect" that had unleashed the "catastrophic" consequences of the Covid-19.
The lobal Preparedness Monitoring Board is again calling for broad global cooperation and significant, long-term financing of pandemic preparedness and prevention.
It urged the UN, the WHO and international financial institutions like the World Bank to convene a summit on the global health emergency, aimed at agreeing on an international framework for emergency preparedness and response.
The framework should include among other things a "mechanism" to ensure "sustainable, predictable financing on the scale that is required," Brundtland said.
"The return on investment in pandemic preparedness is immense," she said, pointing out that "estimates of the cost of prevention and preparedness are measured in billions of dollars, but the cost of a pandemic is measured in trillions."
Current WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus agreed, telling the virtual event that "spending on health and preparedness is not charity. It is an investment in our future."
Not investing in preparedness, he said, is "as if we wait for the plane to crash and then call for more safety inspections; we wait until the town burns down, then decide we need a fire department."
Tedros stressed that Covid-19 "will not be the last pandemic, nor the last global health emergency".
"Every day that we stand by and do nothing is a day that brings us closer to the next global health emergency, whether from a disease outbreak, climate change or a natural or self-inflicted disaster," he said.
"We do not know what the next global health emergency will be, but we know it will come, and we must be prepared."
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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