World leaders are “gambling with their children’s and grandchildren’s health and wellbeing” by failing to prepare for a future pandemic, a new report warns. Amid surging cases of H5N1 bird flu in mammals, and an mpox outbreak in central Africa, two senior stateswomen have said the lack of preparation had left the world vulnerable to “devastation”. Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia, were co-chairs of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response , which was set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020.
At a World Health Assembly in May 2021, the panel set out a series of recommendations to change how the world tackled pandemic threats and avoid mistakes made during the Covid-19 response. Today, they said that at the current rate of preparation, the world would probably be overwhelmed by any new pandemic threat. “This is not the time to gamble.
Inaction is a dangerous political choice,” they wrote in a new report , accusing leaders of shifting focus “to more politically pressing issues”. The three years since their first recommendations are “a dangerously long time to leave gaping holes in the national, regional and international systems meant to protect 8 billion people”, they said The H5N1 bird flu outbreak, which is affecting rising numbers of mammals including dairy cattle in the US, “portends an influenza pandemic the world is nowhere near ready to mana.
