A Global Leadership Fail

 

The headline in Scientific American was jarring. What we must do to prepare for the next pandemic.

If this pandemic taught us one thing, it’s that we weren’t ready for it. The scientific and medical community wasn’t ready. The government, the military and industry weren’t ready. And most of us at home weren’t ready either: scrambling for basic supplies, regretting not having a deeper pantry and struggling with the financial fallout.

The "next pandemic"? Jeebus, we haven't even finished with Covid-19. For the past 12 to 15 months we've been put through the wringer. We're only just getting to the point of mass vaccination, one dose at that. Our governments have been borrowing enormous sums of money to keep civil society and the economy relatively intact. Do we really need to worry about the next pandemic? That's almost too horrible to contemplate. Isn't that like performing an autopsy before the person is dead? 

Today brings a study, commissioned by the World Health Organization, that gives global leadership a failing grade for the way the pandemic was handled. The verdict: the Covid-19 pandemic was a "preventable disaster."

The Covid pandemic was a preventable disaster that need not have cost millions of lives if the world had reacted more quickly, according to an independent high-level panel, which castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to bring it to an end and ensure it cannot happen again.

The report of the panel, chaired by the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, found “weak links at every point in the chain”.

Who can forget those heady, early days when we found out we didn't have much PPE for frontline medical personnel and no capacity to produce the stuff, leaving Canada dependent on foreign companies? Or how, not knowing what to do, we swarmed groceries and other stores, emptying the shelves of toilet paper - and other stuff like flour, sugar and such. We didn't know what hit us, we really didn't. Was it the Black Death? Was anybody safe?

Then summer arrived just as the first wave ebbed. What did we do? We took a victory lap. One and done, baby. It was all "fun in the sun." Our leaders, such as they were, sat back as we kickstarted the next wave.

Clark described February 2020 as “a month of lost opportunity to avert a pandemic, as so many countries chose to wait and see”.

“For some, it wasn’t until hospital ICU beds began to fill that more action was taken,” she said. “And by then it was too late to avert the pandemic impact. What followed then was a winner takes all scramble for PPE and therapeutics. Globally, health workers were tested to their limits and the rates of infection, illness and death soared and continue to soar.”

Urgent action must be taken, she said. “There are many reviews of previous health crises that include sensible recommendations. Yet, they sit gathering dust in UN basements and on government shelves … Our report shows that most countries of the world were simply not prepared for a pandemic.”

We need leaders who won't keep driving us into the same ditch. Know any?


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