Covid-19: WHO blames spiked Italy report on error, ‘overlooked’ rule

The World Health Organization denied on Thursday that Italian officials pressured it to spike a report on Italy’s coronavirus response but said the UN agency should have shared the document with Italy’s government before publishing it.

Dr Hans Kluge, head of WHO’s Europe office, said the agency’s procedures had been “overlooked,” as he sought to explain WHO’s decision to pull the report from its website a day after it was posted May 13. By then, it had already cleared all internal WHO approval protocols and been printed.

The mystery over the spiked report became a headache for WHO and a problem for the Italian government. The document noted that Italy hadn’t updated its influenza pandemic preparedness plan since 2006 and that its initial response as virus cases multiplied was “improvised, chaotic and creative.”

Probe under way

Prosecutors in Italy’s Bergamo province are investigating whether any criminal liability should be assigned over the vast number of deaths after Italy, in late February, became the first Western nation with a significant outbreak. They have questioned the report’s lead coordinator, who has said an Italian WHO official pressured him to falsify the date of the pandemic plan.

WHO previously said the report was removed because it contained unspecified “factual inaccuracies” and wasn’t reposted because a different review process was adopted instead. Kluge said Thursday that the inaccuracies concerned a time line about the virus in China, which the authors had immediately deleted and had new versions of the report printed without it.