Global Ebola Response Panel, including DGHI's Muhammad Pate, Issues Report

An independent group of 19 experts from around the globe, co-chaired by adjunct global health professor Muhammad Pate, has issued a hard-hitting analysis of the global response to the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, published in The Lancet. The panel was convened by the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The report offers 10 major reform proposals to prevent future such catastrophes, with emphasis on preventing major disease outbreaks; responding to outbreaks; producing and sharing research data, knowledge, and technologies; and improving the governance of the global health system, with a focus on the World Health Organization (WHO). 

Panel members concluded that while the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak “engendered acts of outstanding courage and solidarity,” it also caused “immense human suffering, fear and chaos, largely unchecked by high level political leadership or reliable and rapid institutional responses.” Panel members come from academic institutions, think tanks and civil society, with expertise in Ebola, disease outbreaks, public and global health, international law, development and humanitarian assistance and national and global governance. 

The panel is chaired by professor Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and co-discoverer of the Ebola virus. “We need to strengthen core capacities in all countries to detect, report and respond rapidly to small outbreaks, in order to prevent them from becoming large-scale emergencies,” Piot said. “Major reform of national and global systems to respond to epidemics is not only feasible, but also essential so that we do not witness such depths of suffering, death and social and economic havoc in future epidemics. The AIDS pandemic put global health on the world's agenda. The Ebola crisis in West Africa should now be an equal game changer for how the world prevents and responds to epidemics.” 

In addition to over 11,000 deaths from Ebola, the epidemic “brought national health systems to a halt, rolled back hard-won social and economic gains in a region recovering from civil wars, sparked worldwide panic, and cost several billion dollars in short-term control efforts and economic losses.” 

“We issued what may well be the strongest rebuke to the World Health Organization on its handling of the 2014 Ebola outbreak of any group to date," said Pate, who is also the former Nigerian Minister of State for Health. “There was a frightening lack of local public health systems and infrastructure and a breathtaking absence of leadership on the part of the world body when it came to an effective response to the Ebola crisis. Our panel suggests critically needed reforms.”

The report’s 10 recommendations provide a roadmap to strengthen the global system for outbreak prevention and response: 

1. Develop a global strategy to invest in, monitor and sustain national core capacities 
2. Strengthen incentives for early reporting of outbreaks and science-based justifications for trade and travel restrictions 
3. Create a unified WHO Center with clear responsibility, adequate capacity, and strong lines of accountability for outbreak response 
4. Broaden responsibility for emergency declarations to a transparent, politically-protected Standing Emergency Committee 
5. Institutionalize accountability through an independent commission for disease outbreak prevention and response 
6. Develop a framework of rules to enable, govern and ensure access to the benefits of research 
7. Establish a global fund to finance, accelerate and prioritize R&D 
8. Sustain high-level political attention through a Global Health Committee of the Security Council 
9. A new deal for a more focused, appropriately-financed WHO 
10. Good governance of WHO through decisive, timebound reform and assertive leadership 

According to Liberian panel member Mosoka Fallah, of Action Contre La Faim International (ACF), “The human misery and deaths from the Ebola epidemic in West Africa demand a team of independent thinkers to serve as a mirror of reflection on how and why the global response to the greatest Ebola calamity in human history was late, feeble and uncoordinated.” 

“We gathered world-class experts and asked, how can we bolster the dangerously fragile global system for outbreak response?” said the panel's study director, Suerie Moon, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Kennedy School. 

“There is a high risk that we will fail to learn our lessons,” said the Harvard Global Health Institute’s Ashish Jha. “We’ve had big outbreaks before and even careful reviews after, but often the world gets distracted. We owe it to the more than 11,000 people who died in West Africa to see that that doesn’t happen this time.”

This article was adapted from a press release issued jointly by the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and reprinted with permission.