Panel says politics, trade worries slowed UN Ebola response, avoids blaming

The panel’s chief, Barbara Stocking, a ex- head of Oxfam GB, said it didn’t single anyone out.

“This is a defining moment for the health of the global community”, the report said.

In a report published Tuesday, the panel blamed the organization as a whole for being late in activating emergency procedures, despite early warnings from other groups like Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. “The longstanding policy of zero nominal growth policy for assessed contributions has dangerously eroded the purchasing power of WHO’s resources, further diminishing the organisation’s emergency capacity”, said the report. “The answer is yes”.

WHO said it has started to implement some of the recommendations such as a global health emergency workforce and contingency fund. In a statement, the agency said it agrees there needs to be better integration between its emergency and humanitarian responses.

Funding for emergency response was also found to be “lacking”, and the panel recommended that further investments be made with “vigour”.

Experts called on Tuesday for urgent, root-and-branch changes to the World Health Organization (WHO) after an inadequate response to West Africa’s vast and deadly Ebola outbreak.

The report instead criticized WHO’s bureaucratic culture, saying the agency’s sluggish efforts to contain the virus were partly explained by “a hope that the crisis could be managed by good diplomacy”.

The panel said that in Sierra Leone, the involvement of British armed forces meant command and control was not initially given to civilian leadership, and while there may be a place for military support “as agreed in civil/military guidelines, this must be under civilian control”.

It described the epidemic as “largest and most complex Ebola outbreak on record”, with 27,443 reported, confirmed, probable or suspected cases as of June 28. Less than 25% of the WHO’s budget comes from core funds contributed by member states and there are no core funds for emergency response.

“In light of the unpredictable nature of outbreaks and other health crises – and the mounting scale of ecological changes that may trigger them – improving WHO’s leadership and response to events such as these is critical”.

Some have argued for replacing the WHO, but the panel said it must still take the lead in world health disasters.

Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust global health charity who has previously called for a separate emergency response unit to be established within WHO, urged governments to support the panel’s recommendations. In fact, an internal World Health Organization report obtained by the Associated Press in October 2014, stated: “Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall”. “WHO must re-establish its pre-eminence as the guardian of global public health; this will require significant changes throughout WHO”, the report declared.