WHO denies politics swayed Ebola emergency declaration

(Agencies) Updated: 2015-03-24 09:52

Frieden said WHO's international emergency declaration should have been based mainly on health criteria.

"We need to ensure the technical issues are always the primary issues that lead to the decisions that are made," he said.

WHO argues that an emergency - the equivalent of a global SOS - wasn't needed despite criteria which suggest one is warranted when there's a high risk that the disease will jump to another country and spark a new outbreak there.

Recently drafted internal talking points seen by AP say West Africa's borders are so porous that it didn't make sense to declare an emergency despite the fact that the virus was causing an epidemic across three countries by early 2014.

"What we needed to see before declaring (an international emergency) was whether other countries that did not have this continuous cross-border movement were at risk," the talking points state. Harris, the spokeswoman, said that only happened in July when a Liberian passenger sick with the virus arrived in Nigeria.

Other experts weren't persuaded.

"I find that a very strange argument because to consider that an epidemic that had taken hold in three different countries was not an international epidemic ... (it) doesn't make sense," said Christopher Stokes, general director of Doctors Without Borders, which published a report on the outbreak Monday.

In its talking points, WHO tries to draw a distinction between declaring a global emergency and responding to the crisis, arguing that it mounted "a strong operational response" last year.

But that is disputed by several people who witnessed WHO's response on the ground. Many defenders of WHO, including senior people within the agency, say the organization just isn't cut out for hands-on work in the field.

"The role of WHO is to provide technical assistance to a country," Briand, the WHO official, told AP two weeks ago. "We're not made for operations."

WHO announced earlier this month it had created an independent panel of experts to assess its response to Ebola and a preliminary report is due in May.