Report: WHO blocked the complaint of the lack of updating of the Italian pandemic plan for 14 years

Tonight’s episode report “will reveal a series of confidential emails received through a leak. It is about internal WHO communications on the management of a media bomb, the report ‘An unprecedented challenge: Italy’s first response to COVID-19’ by a team of researchers from the European division of the WHO ”. The Guardian had anticipated the report’s existence in mid-August and the story had bounced off the Italian media.

The report’s investigation sheds new light on the case. “The study, funded with about $ 100,000 by a grant from Kuwait, described the lights and shadows of Italian preparation and management of the Covid-19 crisis. It was meant to be used by other countries and more generally by stakeholders in the healthcare world to draw useful lessons from the good practices and mistakes of the first great Western country to face the virus. But on May 14, just one day after it was posted, it was pulled and never made available again. An embarrassment to the Kuwaiti government that had paid for him. “

“From the leak in our possession we deduce – they continue from the Report – that the reason for the censorship is that the report embarrassed the Italian government and the Minister of Health Speranza and even more so the Deputy Director of the WHO, Ranieri Guerra. In fact, among the various critical issues pointed out by the researchers, it is certified that the Italian pandemic prevention plan was very old, from 2006. And never updated. One of the executives who had to update it was Ranieri Guerra, who between 2014 and 2017 was Director of Prevention of the Ministry of Health. And this May 11, shortly before the publication of the report, and a few hours after an episode of the Report that allegedly denounced the delay of the pandemic plan, in his capacity as the highest WHO official he wrote to one of the authors to indicate as the date of the 2016 plan instead of 2006. But 2016 is only the update date of the website and not the plan. “Ultimately, Guerra would have asked Soumya Swaminatham, chief scientist of the central WHO, a sleight of hand “assuming that the prestigious scientist was at his disposal to change a text not for scientific reasons but for political reasons.”