In a 45-page article, the Lancet Covid-19 Commission warned that many governments had proved “untrustworthy and ineffective” as the pandemic erupted around the world, citing examples such as wealthier nations stockpiling vaccine doses and failing to fund global response efforts and politicians such as former US President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the dangers of the virus, even though hundreds of thousands of their citizens have died from it. “What we saw — instead of a global strategy of cooperation — was basically every country on its own,” Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who chaired the panel, told reporters at a briefing called by the prestigious medical journal. “National leaders decide … the strategy and fortunes of their countries in an incredibly random way.” As a result, the virus traversed the world in “extremely uneven” ways, the committee concluded, with serious consequences for the most vulnerable, including children who suffered learning losses from disrupted school attendance, people in low-income countries forced to wait for vaccine doses, and patients who endure ongoing pain and other health problems attributed to prolonged Covid. “Global and national decisions have failed to take into account the least vocal of our communities – those who don’t vote, like immigrants and refugees, or who don’t have the energy to voice their concerns, like our elders. People who were too busy taking care of us, like essential workers and women who were on the front lines fighting the virus without professional equipment,” said Gabriela Cuevas Barrón, Mexican politician and member of the Lancet panel. The Lancet report also criticized the WHO, saying the global health watchdog had “acted too cautiously and too slowly” on several urgent matters, such as identifying the virus that was spreading via airborne transmission. The Commission is calling for the UN agency to be strengthened by giving it more funding and power, and is also urging the creation of a new global health council to help the WHO make timely decisions. In a statement, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the agency welcomed the panel’s recommendations and agreed with its call for more funding. But Harris warned of “several key omissions and misinterpretations”, saying the panel had mischaracterised “the speed and scope of WHO’s actions”. As health providers around the world prepare for a third winter of the coronavirus, the Commission argues that “globally coordinated efforts” can end the pandemic, urging a sustained approach to mass vaccinations, the adoption of public health measures such as coverage in certain environments, social and financial support for infected people to continue to isolate, and true cooperation between the most influential nations in the world. “China, the United States, the EU, India, the Russian Federation and other major regional and global powers must put aside their geopolitical rivalries to work together to end this pandemic and prepare for the next and other global crises”. the report concluded. The Lancet Commission report carries no legal or regulatory authority. But his recommendations, based on more than two years of work by more than 170 experts, represent one of the most popular efforts to identify lessons from Covid-19 and how to better prepare for the next pandemic. U.S. efforts to conduct a bipartisan review of its response to the pandemic have stalled in Congress, and other independent bids have also struggled to win funding or gain widespread attention. But the Lancet report also comes after Sachs, the panel’s chairman, publicly embraced the “lab leak theory”, which argues that the virus may have escaped from a laboratory and could even be of artificial origin, leading to backlash from scientists who warned that his advocacy of the disputed theory would cloud the commission’s work. Government officials like Anthony S. Fauci are “not being honest” about the origin of the virus, Sachs claimed in an August podcast with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread conspiracy theories about vaccines. Sachs also authored a May article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that argued that US scientists may have had a role in shaping SARS-CoV-2 and called for the origins of the pandemic to be investigated through a “bipartisan congressional inquiry with full investigative powers’. Sachs’ defense sparked a private, long-running dispute with other committee members who say there is much more evidence that the virus has a “natural origin” and was first transmitted to humans from an animal, and who have worked to reach a compromise. the final report would say. Scientists are sharpening the argument that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan market “Along with a few other commissioners, I helped with efforts to keep the conspiracy nonsense and whacka-doodle out of the final report,” said Peter Hotez, a virologist at Baylor College of Medicine and a member of the committee. “I will be disappointed if conspiracies about the origins of Covid end up diminishing some of the significant and legitimate gaps in our understanding of how SARS, MERS and Covid emerged.” The committee’s report urged further investigation into both the lab leak and natural origin theories, blaming the National Institutes of Health for failing to provide more information about the US government’s possible role in funding Chinese coronavirus research. “The search for origins requires unbiased, independent, transparent and rigorous work by international groups in virology, epidemiology, bioinformatics and other related fields,” the report concludes. The commissioners also called for the WHO to be empowered to inspect and regulate facilities where scientists study and experiment on viruses that could trigger potential pandemics. “Operational gain research” can lead to more lethal or contagious versions of viruses, and the panel warned that there is too little oversight on “manipulation of dangerous pathogens”. “Advances in biotechnology over the past two decades have made it possible to create new and highly dangerous pathogens,” the report concludes. “Even today, there is little understanding and clarity about the research on SARS-like viruses that was underway just before the COVID-19 pandemic.” However, the report offered no new scientific information about the origin of the virus and did not mention two papers recently published in the journal Science that say the pandemic started in a market in China rather than a laboratory. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Agency at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, said she found the report’s claims about the origin of the virus and the operation’s profit research “disgusting.” “None of the relevant evidence was reported, and it’s clear why: There is doubt suggesting an equal likelihood of natural and laboratory origin that is completely inconsistent with our current scientific understanding,” Rasmussen said. “It’s hard not to believe that this omission is intentional to suggest that the ‘lab leak’ is more plausible than it is — as well as to promote the completely baseless and unfounded view that the pandemic originated from so-called research” operating profit”. and there is a conspiracy involving both the Chinese authorities and the NIH to cover it up.” The final report comes after more than two dozen experts argued in the Lancet in February 2020 that it was a “conspiracy theory” to think that Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory. Since then, the publication and those authors have faced scrutiny that the statement was rushed by scientists trying to get ahead of their own research. The Lancet report also builds on longstanding principles of international development, arguing that universal health coverage and more financial support for international health efforts would provide much-needed protection against emerging infectious diseases. Joel Achenbach contributed to this report.
